A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Making a Nuc

When I brought the terrible queen home from Ron's on Memorial Day, May 27, I made a nuc to house her and closed it up so that the bees would have 24 hours without a queen.  Meanwhile the queen who was in a queen clip, slipped out of the clip and was wandering around in the pillow case in which I brought her home.  I left her there over night and the next morning, she was dead.

I added a frame of brood and eggs to the created nuc and decided to see if it would make a go of things.

Now if they made a queen, she should have emerged about the middle of June - and if all went well, she should have been laying by Father's Day.

The little nuc has been looking pretty happy.  Bees are flying in and out.  When I've peeked inside, there seem to be plenty of bees.

So this weekend I thought I'll bet they have a laying queen, so I'll move them out of this box and into a medium hive body.

I opened the hive and found lots of bees and one frame on which there were eggs and brood.

This was quite a funny thing.  On one side of the frame were cells with an obvious laying worker: five and six eggs in the cells.

On the other side were single eggs, tiny larvae and small c-shaped larvae.  - sorry for the blurry photo, but you can see the light biscuit flat-capped worker cells.  What does this mean?

Did a laying worker develop as the queen was getting mated?  A laying worker only results in drone brood and the brood on one side of this frame is flat-capped like worker brood and single eggs.  However, clearly there is a laying worker or maybe the queen just didn't quite get the hang of it at first. I know sometimes they lay multiple eggs in the cells when they are starting out.

At first I set the frame away from the hive, thinking I would see what bees returned to the hive.  But then I thought there clearly is a single egg laying queen....so I returned the frame to the hive.

So here it is in the new configuration.  Bees are again flying in and out.  I gave them a new frame of brood and eggs from the Morningside nuc.

Every time I steal a frame of brood and eggs from that nuc, I think about My Sister's Keeper, that novel about the little girl whose parents had her to provide body parts for her dying sister?  But the nuc, like the little girl, seems to keep on keeping on despite my constantly raiding it for brood and eggs.

I'll leave the new hive for a while and we'll see what develops (or doesn't).

I did add an entrance reducer after I took this photo.

Laying Worker, Lost Hive

After we picked up bees last weekend, Julia and I went over to her house to inspect her big hive, Poppy. The hive was thriving. We saw lovely brood in the top boxes.



We saw her majesty and she allowed a photo opp! (I am so glad to get a really good picture of her!)


Julia's other hive was quiet. Only a few bees went across the threshold while we worked on Poppy. When we finished Poppy, we opened the hive (called Leslie's hive),and found only enough bees to cover a frame or so and we didn't see brood, to speak of.

As we examined the frames we discovered cells with several eggs in each cell. This is a clear sign of a laying worker.

See the eggs in the cells below? They don't stand as upright as when the queen lays them and several cells have more than one egg in them.



The old way of thinking says that if the queen is alive and active in a hive, her pheromone production serves to suppress the hormones of the workers. All the workers are fully developed females but they have not been fertilized. Consequently a worker is only capable of laying drone brood.

However, without the pheromone of the queen, the survival instinct of the hive would inspire a worker or workers to begin becoming "productive" at least as much as they can without fertilization females.

However in the Wisdom of the Hive, Seeley says that it is now "clear that the pheromones that provide the proximate stimulus for workers to refrain from laying eggs come mainly from the brood, not from the queen." (Seeley, Wisdom of the Hive, 1995, p. 11) This determination came from Seeley's own study in 1985 and one by Willis Winston, and Slessor in 1990.

Seeley also writes that in a queenright colony, the worker bees police the worker-laid eggs, destroying them when they find them. Isn't that interesting. From a Darwinian point of view, it is for survival of the fittest, but too complex to go into here.

Julia brought the frame in and took the photo below of the frame with no bees on it so we could better see the multiple eggs.

The Queen in a Nuc Gets Busy Fast

The other day I was looking at the fantastic picture on my beekeeping friend in Turkey, Halil Bilen's blog. He takes lovely pictures and although I can't read his blog, I learn a lot from looking at the pictures.

The picture below is his picture from his blog in April. I noticed that this was a comb hanging down from the top of something and that there are eggs in the comb. Now these eggs look like possibly laying worker eggs because there are two eggs in several cells. Nonetheless, the eggs in the cell in the comb hanging from the top reminded me of what I saw in two of the nucs I recently purchased.


(Thanks for the use of the picture, Halil Bilen!)

In the nucs I bought, there were four frames and a spacer in the five frame nuc. The spacer was simply a board the width of a frame with nothing under it. While hanging out in the nuc, the bees took the opportunity to build comb.

When I removed the spacer before shaking the bees into their new hive home, I slid my hive tool under the comb and disconnected it from its spacer roof. I carried it into my house planning to melt it down in the solar wax melter.

After seeing Halil Bilen's picture, I found the comb I had cut off and examined it closely. In most of the cells the queen had laid an egg! The workers took advantage of the space to build beautiful comb of their own and the queen had obliged by laying in it. I hadn't even seen the eggs when I removed the comb!



If you want to see the eggs, double click on the picture below to enlarge it, and they should be fairly easy to see, even without holding the comb up so the sun is behind you as one would do in the beeyard. I can use these combs to show the Girl Scouts what they are looking for in the hive when they look for eggs.