One Month Later
March 4, 2018

A month ago, we moved the Sherman Oaks hive to our home so that we could keep a closer eye on it. I was trying to save the hive since it still had a queen but only a couple hundred bees. Altadena was thriving so Susie and I took some frames of honey and brood from the Altadena hive and consolidated it into the hive at our home. Both hives had queens.

After 10 days, Jeff and I opened the hive at home. There were several supersedure cells and queen cells which I removed as I usually do to discourage swarming… but then we discovered there was no queen to be found. No new eggs or larva. No capped brood. No dead queens on the bottom board.

I wasn’t thinking clearly and didn’t realize then that there must be a queen cell for another queen to be raised. The bees will feed the larva royal jelly from day one and she will develop differently into a queen. Often they will do this several times and then the first queen to emerge will be “crowned queen”. She will then leave the hive to mate with 18 drones and then return to the hive to begin her tenure as queen. She will lay about 200 eggs a day.

The bees were flying around like crazy in our yard (they are a bit frenetic when there is no queen) so I moved it to Altadena with Brisa’s blessing.

When we checked the Altadena hive, I was surprised to find no queen. Tons of bees, nectar and honey. No eggs, larva or capped brood. Susie and I had looked extensively when we moved the frames from Altadena to home. We could never find the queen… but I guess it is possible that she was in the frames we moved, and the two queens fought it out at our home hive. There should have been evidence though of a dead queen somewhere and one queen reigning. Hmmm… are you following me?

We needed queens in order to save these hives. Usually, if you lose your queen you have two options. Buy a queen (but none available in California in January-March) or let them raise their own. The risk of them raising their own is that the Queen will fly out and mate with 18 local drones. And you know the risk of our California and Arizona bees…most are Africanized.

After asking quite a few people for queens, (they are not really available this time a year until April), I remembered that we can order online from Big Island Queens in Hawaii so I ordered three at $35 each, one as a back up, in case one died in transit. Five days later, they arrived.

When we got to Altadena with our new queens, one hive (called Sherman Oaks) appeared to be a “working layer” situation which happens when they don’t have a queen. The queen and her eggs normally emit a pheromone that suppresses the ovaries of the female worker bees in the hive. In the absence of a queen, the ovaries of the female bees kick in and they are able to lay eggs. Because they have never mated, the bees lay only unfertilized eggs which are the drone male bees. It is not just one “laying worker”, but many. One strategy is to take the hive 50 to 100 feet away and shake off all the bees. The “worker layers” will not be able to fly back to the hive but the rest of the bees will navigate using their GPS and come right back to the hive.

There was so much drone larva so we thought this was our only chance to save this hive. We did this. Bees flying everywhere but Jeff shook them all off and then brought the empty frames back and we installed the queen. We closed up the hive, crossed our fingers and checked the other hive.

In the meantime, when all this was happening, my friend Charlotte made friends with a nursery in Lakeview Terrace and they are very interested in having hives so since I had an extra queen coming, I decided to split my Altadena hive into two and use the extra queen for the new location.

We then looked at the Altadena hive (two deep boxes) and found no evidence of any drone larva so those bees appeared to be still ok. This was the hive that we were going to split in order to take one box to the nursery. We started to work on the split and Jeff went to get the queen and her queen cage fell open and the queen and her attendant bees flew off. Oh my gosh!

The boxes were already to split and the nursery was expecting us so we decided to leave the Altadena hive without a queen and order one more queen. We then went to the Paramont nursery in Lakeview Terrace and installed the hive with the new queen on the hill and there she will sit for five days until she is released into the hive.

No one said this would be easy… and our friend and mentor Les said, laughingly, “prepare to be disappointed!” Disappointed yes…but still ready to face another year in this beekeeping adventure.

So long! Will provide another update in a few days.