The bright side

The first day of summer seems an appropriate day to find our first new queen of the season, happily laying eggs in one of our strongest hives. Quite a lot of things go wrong with my beekeeping, so it's even more pleasing when they occasionally go right. This is how we got from where we were to where we are

Three weeks ago, we found the old queen preparing to swarm - leave the hive with half the bees in her wake and find a new home ('old' is relative - she hatched last year). We did the job for her: took her out and moved her, with some accompanying workers to a new box, elsewhere in the apiary. She has settled there very nicely, and is laying so well that I'm starting to worry about her colony outgrowing the box

In the now queenless hive, the bees finished the cells in which they had started rearing new queens - topping them up with plenty of 'royal jelly': the carbohydrate-rich nutrient that ensures the larvae grow into queens, not workers. Two weeks ago we took some of those now-sealed cells out to another small box, with some bees that could care for them until - if we are lucky - they produce a spare queen

At the same time, in the original hive itself, we removed all the remaining queen cells except one. If we leave more than one, there is a risk that, when the first new queen emerges, the colony will decide that they can issue a second swarm, because they still have other queen's on the way to keep themselves going

A day or two later, a new queen emerged from that single cell we left. She spent a couple of days in the hive, exercising her wings and maturing fully then, accompanied by a few escort workers, she left the hive on a mating flight. She flew to a 'drone congregation area' - a rather mysterious location where drones from many colonies come together, 30-40 metres high, and wait for virgin queens to visit. These areas remain in the same location year after year and no one one knows quite why

The queen flies through the collection of drones and the fastest of them catch her and mate with her on the wing. Their sexual organ cannot be withdrawn from the queen's body and is pulled away from the drone, along with some of its internal organs, resulting in its death. The queen will mate with 15-30 drones over the course of one of more mating flights. She holds the sperm that she receives in her abdomen for the rest of her life, and uses it to fertilise all of the eggs she ever lays (unless they are drone eggs, which are unfertilised). She will never mate again - in fact she will never leave the hive again, unless it is to swarm

After her mating flight(s), she spends a few days preparing to start work, and then begins laying - her task for the rest of her life. In our hive, that happened 4 or 5 days ago and, when we visited today, we found eggs, and also very young larvae in their own - rather smaller - pool of royal jelly, on the way to becoming worker bees

Three weeks from the loss of the old queen to having a new one with eggs and larvae underway is about as good as it gets, so we are very pleased. I wish I could say this is a shot of us leaving the apiary in the glow of a job well done, but the truth is that this is taken in our second apiary, where the sick colony is, and things are not going so swimmingly. But let's gloss over that and go out on a high