So, oftentimes I'll mark the queen so she's easy to find but this one I think she's
been replaced this season so I think we have a new queen here.
Here's our queen. In thousands of bees she blends in pretty good but if you note her
thorax, the middle segment is not as fuzzy as the worker bees. Here she walks
right by a drone. The drone is short and fat. She's long and lean, nice long abdomen.
She's looking in a cell right now. Maybe she'll even lay an egg for us. Watch her
walk past that cell. There must have been an egg in it. What she does is she'll walk up to a
cell and she gauges that with her front legs. If it's a worker size cell, which most of
these are, she knows when she backs in that cell to fertilize the egg and
produce a worker bee. If it's a drone size cell, the larger cells which you saw
on the other side, she'll lay an egg and as it passes through her body she
doesn't fertilize it and so a drone becomes a drone. It's a half a set of
chromosomes so she's actively looking for a place to lay. She checked that cell.
Some queens are really comfortable to lay an egg in the broad daylight but a
lot of them are kind of shy about it, so I wouldn't count on it. She may just not be
able to find a place on this frame. She may be moving from frame to frame to look
for some space. She's already filled these others up, but it's good that you can see the comparison
of her and the workers. It takes years to get a real keen eye to pick a queen out of
those thousands of bees but after you get used to it she she kind of just stands
out. I won't say I can always find them here we've got lucky found her in the top
box so we didn't have to lift all these boxes to hunt her to the bottom. So now that
I've got the queen on this frame, I definitely be very careful. I wouldn't want
to set this frame outside of the hive. When I place it, I want to know where
she's at, make sure she's not over here where the pinch points are on the frame.
Make sure she's in a safe position because you can crush a queen putting a frame
back in and make sure she's not on the bottom edge of this frame where all
these little chunks of comb are because you could crush her. If I accidentally crushed the
queen, I probably wouldn't even know it you know, putting frames back together.
Within hours every bee in this hive would know that they didn't have a queen.
They would respond to that by locating several larvae
in the 12 hour old stage. It's an egg for about two days, falls over on its side and
hatches. Once it hatches, in that first 12 hours you get the ideal queen. They
can make a queen for a couple days, two, three-day-old-larvae but the best queens
happen when that larvae is very young and they would begin to elongate the cells
and turn them downward. We've got this frame kind of upside down, but turn them downward and
elongate and make queen cells that get much bigger than that. They flood the larvae with
royal jelly so the queen gets a super diet as she's being raised and that's
basically what produces a queen and once those queens hatch, they hunt down their
sisters because generally only one queen can prevail in the hive and they fight to
the death.
Whoever the queen is that wins, once she's got her strength a few days or a
week later, she takes mating flights and once she's mated and ready to lay she
saves all that sperm in her body in the spermatheca and
she'll never leave the hive again unless they swarm. So once she's mated, if
she runs out a sperm she doesn't get an opportunity to go do it again. It's a
one-time deal over the course of a couple days that she mates and then she won't leave the hive again unless
they swarm.