THE MAKING OF A QUEEN

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An amateur apiarist can revitalize queenless colonies, or successfully divide strong ones, if the beekeeper understands . . .

I used to depend on two beehives to provide me with about 100 pounds of fresh honey each year . . . but—upon inspecting my tiny apiary after a recent, unusually severe Ohio winter—I discovered that the cold weather had entirely wiped out one of my colonies! I knew that once spring came I could restock my empty hive with a mail-ordered beesand-queen package. But I decided, instead, to use the hive community I had left to establish a new colony . . . complete with its own queen!

My procedure wasn't terribly complicated, either. It should be well within the abilities of any backyard beekeeper. And the "queen making" skill can be an important one for any apiarist to master.

Before I could use the "trick", however, I wanted to make sure my remaining colony was at its peak strength. So I waited until May . . . when the bee population had "blossomed" along with the spring flowers. I then opened the hive, examined the insects' brood box, and located the queen. I let her crawl between my thumb and forefinger, gently grasped her thorax, or midsection-being careful not to clasp the abdomen, or tail section, where she makes her eggsand clipped off a piece of one of her wings using cuticle scissors. (I knew I didn't need to worry about stings during this operation, because queen bees al most never "attack".)

I then gently transferred the "ground ed" insect to my empty hive, along with two frames containing ready-to-hatch brood cells plus one frame laden with honey and another containing pollen. The four racks provided food stores and, most importantly, a source of soon-to-emerge young workers (known as nurse bees) that would tend to all the queen's needs.

Once the colony-starting elements were in place, I closed up my "reborn" hive and blocked off most of its entryway . . . so the temporarily short-handed residents could defend their supplies from any invading "robber" bees. (I removed the entrance reducer two weeks later.)

So far, so good . . . but how, you may ask, did the strong hive find itself a new queen? The answer is simple: The bees made themselves one. Worker bees and queen bees, you see, come from the same type of eggs! (A worker is a sexually undeveloped female, while the prolific queen—an Insect that can lay up to 1,500 eggs a day during the height of the summer season—is a fully matured reproducer.) The "secret ingredient" that makes one female egg develop into a lowly laborer and another into the hive's highness is a beemade food called royal jelly.

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