It’s a busy time of year in the beekeeping calendar. As the colonies rapidly expand to take advantage of the increased pollen and nectar flow they need careful management. Throughout May, June and July weekly inspections of the hives are essential to check for the production of queen cells. The raising of new queens being a sure sign the bees are about to swarm resulting in the loss of at least half of the bees and of course their ability to produce honey.
I’ve enjoyed watching my colonies rapidly expand throughout April and early May as the great weather has helped to encourage the local flora to blossom. We also have large amounts of oil seed rape growing in the fields surrounding Smithy Brook providing a further enormous source of forage.
My weekly inspections are intended to check that all is well in the colony. This means that there is evidence of eggs and brood showing that a fertile queen is laying. Hopefully the queen can be spotted during the inspection and I have mine marked with a dot of colour to help with this. In a busy hive it isn’t always possible to see her but providing there is ample evidence she is laying I don’t usually worry. Most importantly I’m checking for queen cells. These are the special cells the workers build in order to raise new queens. The workers will build the cells usually hanging vertically on a frame and the queen will then lay an egg in them. This ordinary egg is then fed by the workers with royal jelly and it is this that causes it to become a queen. They will often raise multiple queens at the same time. Shortly before a new queen is due to hatch the current queen will leave the hive with all the bees old enough to fly in search of a new home and to start a new colony. This is a swarm and is the method by which bees reproduce.
The aim of the beekeepers inspections is to spot this before it happens and to try to thwart the swarm. This is done by various means. some beekeepers will destroy the growing queen cells. I like to create an artificial swarm where I remove the existing queen and her flying bees to a new hive leaving behind the fresh brood and young bees in the existing hive. Having done the work of swarming for the bees in creating a fresh colony I then hope the bees will choose to remain in my apiary rather than flying off to start somewhere else. This has a good success rate but as bees are essentially wild creatures nothing is guaranteed and they will in the end do what they like.
My last couple of inspections I have found that a colony that has always been quite placid and easy to handle has become very aggressive. Last week took me by surprise as the bees poured out of the hive despite my smoking them and surrounded me in a cloud. Constantly banging against my face shield and repeatedly trying to sting through my protective clothing. A couple of bees found their mark and I was left with several stings. Very unusual. This week I was a little better prepared. I took my time smoking them and then attempted to carry out a very brief inspection to check for queen cells only. Within seconds of opening the brood box I had to abandon the inspection and quickly reassemble the hive as I was receiving multiple stings and the bees were very angry. Wow. In ten years of beekeeping this was the first time I’d ever abandoned an inspection.
Contemplating this afterwards I noted I’d not seen my marked queen on the last couple of inspections. Trying to work out what had happened I came to the conclusion that I’d somehow missed a growing queen cell (this is easy to do and catches out every beekeeper at some time in his career) and that my bees had raised a new queen and deposed and killed the old queen. My old queen was two years old and should have been good for this season but as already mentioned, bees are wild and if they decided she wasn’t performing well enough they will replace her. I then decided that the virgin queen who would have taken a mating flight to mate with multiple drones in order to become fertile must have mated with a more aggressive strain and was now laying and hatching aggressive bees. As all the bees other than the queen are replaced every few weeks this all sounded very feasible.
As this was the first time this has happened for me I put a couple of posts out in beekeeping Facebook groups that I am in to see what others thought. Whilst several members thought my theory was probably correct and my queen had been superseded, quite a few members started to ask the same question; are your bees foraging oil seed rape at the moment? Apparently it is not uncommon for bees to become aggressive whilst foraging rape. Wow. Ten years keeping bees and every year oil seed rape is grown close by and I’d not heard this before. Thinking back over the years I have had previous colonies become aggressive in the summer and then calm down again. I’d just never made the oil seed rape connection. The joy of showing a bit of ignorance and asking a question on social media reaps great rewards at times.
Well with this new bit of knowledge added to my beekeeping arsenal I will take a bit of time to decide how to treat my aggressive colony. My plan had been to buy in a mated queen from a reliable source and to remove my existing queen. This would have meant that within a few weeks all my bees in that colony would be the more placid bees raised from the new queen and my problem would be solved. On the advise of others I’m going to wait a couple of weeks to see what happens when the oil seed rape is finished. If my colony calms down and returns to normal then all is well. If not I can still go down the route of re-queening.
Unfortunately I still need to carry out my weekly inspections whilst I wait to see if they calm down or not. For the next one’s I shall be wearing some very thick layers of clothing under my bee suit to make it as difficult as possible for their stings to reach me.
Wish me luck!
