Death of a queen

No, not The Queen. I’m talking about bees.

For a few years now I’ve been sporadically helping some friends with their bee hives. They are hobby beekeepers, with around a dozen hives between them. Last week, I helped them do the first check of the hives for the spring. At the start of winter, the hives had been left with plenty of honey and enough space to build more comb if they desired. The plan last Thursday was to go into the hives and check they had wintered well.

Healthy bees in the hive

The first hive was fine. The second had a bit of mould on some of the frames in the top box. Water must have got in during a storm. We removed the mouldy frames from the hive and replaced them with clean ones, then left the bees to get on with spring. We carried on in a similar fashion with the next hive and so on, until we got to our second last hive.

Our first observation on this hive was that there were very few bees coming and going through the entrance and the ones we saw were very docile. We lifted the lid and it was covered in cobwebs of some sort. Strange. We lifted a frame. It was very mouldy and full of wax moth. The next frame was the same. And the next. The bees were scant and passive. The hive walls were riddled with wax moth pupae.

Wax moth are a known pest of bee hives. They are small, brown, nondescript moths that lay eggs in hives and the larvae feed off the beeswax and pollen in the hive. The wax moth larvae spin webbing as they tunnel though the hive; the webs we saw when we lifted the lid on the hive were actually wax moth larvae webbing. Healthy hives can deal with wax moths and can fight off an infestation, but a hive that is low in numbers or in poor condition for some reason cannot. For some reason, this hive had not fought off the wax moth.

We worked through the hive, lifting the ruined honeycomb, assessing the damage, trying to work out what had happened. The few bees in the hive were not bothered by our actions. We figured they were probably robber bees; they would have come in from other hives to steal the honey from this hive. We put aside the smoker – the device used by beekeepers to emit smoke to calm bees. We didn’t need it on this hive.

We worked our way down the boxes of frames to the brood chamber, where the queen resides and lays eggs. The queen is bigger than the worker bees, so is prevented from moving up into the honey frames by a screen that the workers can fit through but the queen can’t. We found some brood – bee larvae. That seemed strange, because this wasn’t a healthy hive and we couldn’t find the queen From the small number of bees in the hive, it seemed that there hadn’t been an active queen for some time. How could there be brood? The queen is the egg layer of the hive; that’s her job. All the bees in a hive are the queen’s offspring. Queens can live for several years, laying many thousands of eggs – fertilised ones to produce workers and unfertilised ones to produce drones (male bees).

But it turns out that worker bees, who are all female, can also lay eggs. When the queen’s pheromones are not dictating the activity of the hive (as in when the queen has died), workers are more likely to lay eggs. This sounds like a good option, except that it isn’t really. The workers can only lay unfertilised eggs, which will hatch into drones. The drones don’t collect nectar or make honey or care for the hive; all of those tasks are done by the workers. The drones only job is mate with a queen during her nuptial flight at the beginning of her life. (Usually this will be a queen from a nearby hive, not the hive the drones live in. I think of it as a community service the hive does, producing drones to maintain the species.) A hive needs a queen to lay fertilised eggs to create a steady stream of worker bees to keep the hive functioning. Each worker bee only lives for about six weeks, so without a queen, the hive is doomed to die. As this one we were sorting through had done.

The hive smelt of death and decay, not the usual sweet honey aroma of a healthy hive. It didn’t have the usual buzz of a working hive. The few bees walking over the existing comb were quiet. They were robbers, so not protective of the hive. And there was no queen here to protect.

I had never seen a dead hive before. Nor had I seen prolific wax moth, so it was an interesting experience. But the thing that struck me most was how sad it was. It was a death, not just of the hive queen but of the whole hive, the whole community. If we had opened the box sooner and discovered the queen was missing, we could possibly have saved it by getting a new queen. (Queen bees can be bought from breeders, already artificially inseminated and ready to get on with their life’s work of laying eggs.) But bees don’t like to be disturbed during winter, so are generally left alone. With little in flower, they hunker down and keep warm and eat their honey stores.

We cleaned out the dead hive and shook the healthy bees from the frames. We scraped away the hive moth larvae and webbing, along with the ants that had come in to feast on the remaining honey. We sorted what could be salvaged from the hive infrastructure and set it aside to be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. The frames and boxes beyond repair were put aside to be burnt.

We disinfected our hive tools and gloves and went into the next hive, which was buzzing with life and smelling of sweet honey. After the dead hive, it was a special delight. There’s nothing quite like that buzz of a happy hive. Once we were assured all was well, we left them to it their business. In coming weeks, we’ll go back into the hives to begin the spring honey harvest.

Thanks for reading,

Jill