Sleuth

More wacky beekeeping. Here are a few curiosities worth exploring. This is a frame from a 'super' - the part of the hive that is separated from the brood area by a 'queen excluder' - ensuring that the queen does not go there to lay eggs

The idea is that the bees have no other use for supers but to store honey, making it easy for the beekeeper to take a harvest without disturbing the brood nest. Here they have obliged - more or less

The cells that are covered with a delicate layer of pure, white wax contain ripe honey. In most of the still-open cells you can see the shining, convex surface of nectar, becoming honey - the bees only cap it when they have evaporated sufficient water from it to make it 80%+ sugar - too strong a solution for bacteria or fungi to live on, so good for long-term storage

In just a few open cells, near the edge of the capped area, you can see 'bee bread' - a mixture of pollen and honey - looking more solid, and with a hint of colour provided by the pollen. Mostly, the bees store pollen like this in the brood area, close to the groowing larvae that it will be fed to, but it is not uncommon to find it in a super. They will not cap these cells

Finally, and most mysteriously, you can see five capped cells in the otherwise uncapped area of nectar. Take it from me that the caps are dome-shaped, not flat like the capped honey. These contain larvae developing into drone bees. To confirm this, I gently lifted the cap off one of them and found two red eyes staring back at me: young drones in the "red-eye" stage of development - within a few days off emerging as adults

The mystery is: if the queen cannot enter this area (and I'm certain she has not), how can there be eggs to develop into bees? Two possibilities exist: bees do sometimes move eggs around from cell to cell; it is possible they have carried a few eggs through the queen excluder to rear them here. The only reason I can think of why they would do that - with drone eggs in particular - is to confuse the beekeeper

I think it is much more likely that this is bee biology gone slightly wrong. The queen is, in fact, not the only bee capable of laying eggs. Worker bees are biologically female, and have the organs to create and produce eggs. Normally, they are prevented from doing so by pheremones released by the laying queen, but this mechanism is not perfect, and very occasionally a worker can begin laying. If they are detected doing so, they will be killed by the other workers, but it still sometimes happens

Of course, worker bees have not mated with any drones, but it is another quirk of bee biology that unfertilised eggs develop into drone bees. This applies equally to eggs layed by the queen: all fertilised eggs develop into female workers (or just a few into queens) and all unfertilised eggs develop into male drones - and the queen decides which kind she lays each time

So I think this is a picture of one of the ragged edges of biology - one of nature's careless brushstrokes, a slip of the author's pen. Case closed