Plain Talk: Releasing Tew Queens (231)

Episode 231 – Plain Talk: Releasing Tew Queens

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Jim Tew: Hi listeners, jump back in the bee yard again. I can't tell you how good it is to actually just be back with bees. I'm just putzing around, but you know those packages I worked on? Those queens are still confined. Since we do plain talk stuff, I'm just going to release them directly, and I was going to talk with you while I did that. If you're so inclined, tell me how you release your package queens. Do you go slowly? Do you go fast or what? I'm going to just go ahead and release mine directly. It's a somewhat risky thing to do.

If you are a listener who's not really done this before, I would stay with the slow-release technique. If you're an old guy and you can afford to make mistakes because you got some bees that you can correct those mistakes with, then do it this way. I'm going to rip into them without smoke. I'm going to, as gently as I can, release the queen, and then I'm going to get out. That's the plan, you know what happens to plans. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I always try to talk about something to do with Plain Talk beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: I can't really say why I've evolved to this point where I release the queens directly. I've had queens not be released and stay in the cage much longer than I've ever intended. They just didn't eat the candy plug out, or a bee died there and blocked the entrance, or the queen or something died inside the cage and blocked the entrance. I just go about the process of releasing directly. Now, having said that, yes, I have had queens fly away. It's a sober moment when $25 or $30 flies away. Pop the top off with the least amount of disruption possible, and there's black carpenter ants everywhere. I'd like to know more about ants and bees. Do they get along okay?

Now I'm inside the colony. I'm going to put the entrance outer cover directly on the ground. I laid a towel over the queen to help protect her. Now the towel 'propolised' down a little bit and got bees all over it, so I'm shaking that off. Going to take just a minute at this point to snap a picture for you that I'll post on the page if you care about seeing it on what the situation is. One picture, two pictures, there's that for you in case you want that. I got my case, Stockman, three-bladed pocket knife out. Reaching down to pick up the queen in cage. They're covering it nicely, that's a good sign. Normally, I would look at the queen and the cage. I'm handling the bees right now gently. If I stroke the bees with my knife blade and they move back away from the queen, fairly uneventfully, then I go ahead and release them.

I got to tell you, listeners, these package is acting strange. They were flighty, they looked more like robbers, and the bees are small. I'm not complaining about them, but they really are still clinging to the cage. Now, I'm having second thoughts. I'd like for them to move back and not be so aggressive. They're going to treat the queen just like they treat the cage; they're fairly agreeable to it, but I'm going to go ahead and do it. They're scenting, so most of the bees are okay. I'll take my knife and spray them off because they've just got the cage matted. Then I'll look inside, and there's the queen, she's alive. That's a major event.

Now I'm taking the primary pointed blade. The bees are coming right back to the cage, slipping it underneath the staple, trying not to stick that knife blade or the wire in my hand. There's the staple reluctantly coming out. Now it's out. I'm holding the cage closed because I don't want that queen to fly. On the other one, when I do it, I'm going to cut off the yellow straps in the way. That was what was holding the cage in the package. Then I'm opening it, and there she goes down in, she's out and gone. That was quick. Now I'm going to take the cage out because the cage is highly attractive.

Feeder can is mostly empty. That's the one I punched the holes in extra, so I'm taking it off. For now, I'm closing my knife blade, which means I've got to get it out for the second one. The bees look okay, they've been flighty, they've not been real happy to be in Ohio, but that's where they are, so they can just learn to live with it. I'm going to take off this outer shell now and just dump it out of the way. I'm going to pick up the inner cover, shake off the carpenter ants that are just absolutely bonkers to live between the inner cover and the outer cover on the undercover. Close that off, and that's it for that particular one. She's in there now.

Now, what listeners, this is one of those dark periods in bee management where I've got to give her now as much time as I can. I'd like to give her, let me just say, five days. Today being Wednesday, come out next Saturday, next Sunday using no smoke. Again, gently pull out a frame or two and just see if I see eggs. If I see one egg, I'd like to see more, but one would be enough, put it all back together, and get out. This queen is not part of these packaged bees. These packaged bees were probably shaken from several colonies, they're not related. They may or may not like each other, and I've got to give that queen a chance to get a brood nest going before I really do a proper hive examination.

The brood nest is much more stabilizing than the queen, so once they have open brood, they will be more tolerant of the queen. If I used smoke and went in and really checked these bees and looked at every frame and got them really upset and got bees in the air, for all I know, that's going to activate old grudges, and they're going to come for that queen. It's already calming down; the bees that I shook off are mostly back in from the towel. I tossed the cage on the ground, it must have 30 or 40 bees on that, so I've got to move that back to the barn.

It looks okay, listeners. Right now, at this point, it looks okay. Now, once she's got a brooded nest going, I do like to mark queens. I'll come back, and I'll go over to one of the hobby stores, and I'll buy one of those enamel paint marker pens. I'll figure out what the color code is for the year, and I'll use that. Even though, honestly, the queens don't live long enough for the color code to really be imported the way it once was when queens could live three to five years. I'll color-code mark her with the correct color. I really prefer yellow or white, so I hope it's one of those years.

Some of you are probably going to write me right away and tell me what the color is. I've got a graft inside the shop, but I can't remember right now. Yellow and white is easy for me to see. Green and red, blue, especially blue. It really blends in with the rest of the bees to some extent. I like to mark. I don't clip anymore, really off the subject now. I used to clip queens because I was taught that that kept the bees and kept the queen close by, so she wouldn't swarm away. All it does is, I think, mutilate the queen and makes them replace her more often.

I'm going to go now to the second colony and essentially do the same thing all over again. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I may use sugar fondant. Even though I put some honey in this colony when I put the package in, I didn't put in a lot, and it was old honey. I'm going to bring some fondant out and feed them. There's a real good pollen flow on right now. Everything's in bloom. It's been a nice spring. Listeners, you know the drill. Taking the towel out. I think before I do that, I'll take a short break, take a sip of water so I can keep talking to you. Let's hear from our sponsor while I do that.

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Jim: All right. That helped. I'm back. Inside this one. Any surprises? Please be no surprises. I got bees really stuck to that old bath towel. I'm going to lay them down in front. The cage is covered. I told you this time I'm going to cut that yellow strap off, that yellow nylon strap, because it was in the way before. It is helpful to pick it up with that. Then, beyond that, it's in the way. She's in my hands. This is the moment. There she is. She's alive. I'm locking the bees off the cage. They tend to fly right back to it. Now I'm trying to cut off the strap. It's gone. Cut that off.

For you people that might be new to beekeeping, yes, you've got to put your hand right down there. There's no other way. You've got to be gentle. If you crush a bee, yes, they're going to sting you. There's the staple out. I'm going to pull the screen back. I'm not breathing on the queen. I lay it right down over the brood nest area. There she goes down in. She's going inside. You'd be dead certain, listeners, that she went inside before you tossed this cage on the ground with your queen in it. It's just me. It's just me, but I tend to keep these cages, so sometime when I'm getting a swarm, I've got a queen cage that if I happen to see her, I can use the cage to confine her in the swarm.

This one has more sugar syrup left. I'm going to put some more holes in that. They've got almost a whole quart. I just use a hive tool and knock about three or four more holes in it. Then I'm going to put that back on. That means I'm going to have this feeder shell left on. There's that. That'll help a little bit. They're eagerly taking it. They look okay. You want that lecture again about how flighty these bees have been? I think it's just their personality. A listener wrote and asked a question that I'm going to follow up on. He asked if colonies had spirit. They do have something like spirit. I wouldn't talk about that because these bees have different personalities. Let's go into that sometime.

It could very well be that it's nothing more than just these bees' personality. Got the towel out front. I'm going to shake the bees off. Just like the other one, they get several days now of solitude for them to be bees and do something else. For absolute truthfulness, this is me going to sit down on an empty hive stand so I can just watch the bees settle down. I don't know why I find watching eager, enthusiastic bees during spring and summer season when they're in fall. Winter's not much to do, but I just love watching them. The sound, the normalcy of it. Sit here.

Now I'm getting all sappy, but I sit here and I watch these and think about my uncle who got me into beekeeping 50 some odd years ago and all the beekeepers through the years and what a benchmark bees have been for me. I'll sit here and watch them for a minute. Let me go back into what I told you. I've released the queens directly with a degree of risk. I've had queens fly away. I think Kim and I talked about that. If you've got a queen that is skittish and takes off, that's not good. The specific instance I've got in mind, it was a rainy day. I was releasing queens directly. I opened the cage just like I just did two times here. That queen came out like the great Satan was in that cage like a bullet and was gone.

Just for a minute, what's that old game, where's Elmo, where's Nemo? In the sky, you can see this clumsy bee flying, totally lost amongst all the other bees. You try, try, try to keep up with that bee only, not the others, to see if by some chance, she lands where you can get to her. Then while you're hoping that, poof, she's gone. At that point, you just have a bad moment. That procedure did not work for you. What I did, and this did work, I just walk away from the colony. Don't touch anything else. Pick up your hive tool, take your smoker, and get away. See if that lost, randomly flying queen will fly through the odor field of this open colony.

Now, in this one instant, I had a success ending. I came back two hours later to an open colony in a light rain was a package that I just installed. Didn't do the package any good to stay open and to sit in the rain, but I was desperate. Listeners, there was that queen sitting on a blade of grass, looking very forlorn and apologetic, all wet and lost. I picked her up. Even though it was rushed, she hadn't been with the package bees all that much. She needed to be put back in the colony. I just released her directly into the colony. Then I did what? I came back three to five days later, checked, and there were eggs. That colony was always called the Rain Queen colony because of the legacy that it had there.

I'm giving you an exact instance when it didn't work. I can also give you instances of bees dying. I said it in the first colony, and bees dying and plugging the hole, and the bees not figuring out how to push by the comrades that they had that were dead in the cage. I should have said when I installed these packages, and I'll say it now, that the packages were in great shape. There were not a lot of dead bees in there. I didn't mention the fact either, but there were no dead attendant bees in the cage. The bees have already settled down. I can't tell anything. This is one of those times in life when you're forced to be patient, because I have to come back to see if she's accepted.

I want to know right now if she's okay. Are they balling her up in there? Are they attacking her? Are they killing her right now? I'm out of time. I wish I hadn't said that, because if that was happening, and you do know it, what I've done in the past, but you've got to be ready for it, is take that ball of angry bees. They're trying to sting her more or less, but they're also killing her because of increased heat production. They're actually overheating her. I'll take that ball of bees, just about the size of a golf ball, usually, and pick it up. They're probably going to sting you when you pick them up, because they're trying to sting anything. Just drop that whole mess in that pan of water. I say that's the instant.

How are you going to get a pan of water? How would you know to bring a pan of water out with you? I was able to get that, and I could separate the drowning bees. They did let go, and I did save that queen. The more routine procedure is just to expose the candy plug in and let the bees eat through it at their own leisure, and then for the queen to quietly come out without a lot of disruptive fanfare. I'll remind you again, that's why I tried to get in and out as quickly as possible with no smoke, least disruption, leave them alone, and then wait, and wait, and wait, to see if my $140 investment per package pays off, or if I screwed something up.

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Jim: I don't care how long you kept bees. You never keep bees long enough that you don't make mistakes, and you don't have bad luck. It's just a part of beekeeping. It makes you really appreciate good luck. How the time flies. I enjoy talking to you, but I don't want to wear out my welcome with you, so I'll tell you bye until next week, where I'll probably give you an update on what's going on here. Bye-bye.

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