Plain Talk: Thoughts on Queen Bees (226)

Episode 226 – Plain Talk: Thoughts on Queen Bees

Jim Tew: Hey, listeners, it's Jim again. Doing what I just did before, and I just can't get enough of it. I'm sitting out here with my bees. At some point, you're going to get tired of me telling you these kinds of things. It's a Saturday afternoon, don't have a lot of time left for getting smokers started, getting dressed up, we're ripping into beehives, so I'm just sitting here thinking. Just thinking. It's a jumble of thoughts, listeners. This one colony I described to you in a previous segment looked really nice, but it's not going to stay that way. It's going to swarm if it maintains its energy output.

What do with it? I got multiple thoughts, and most of them are cockamamish, if that's a word. Why don't you hang on and see if you and I can just have a chat here, just casual, and see if any of this makes any sense for where I presently am on my bee journey. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at HoneyBee Obscura, where I try to talk about something to do just with plain talk beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: I readily admit that I don't know where this conversation's going to go. Feel free to jump in at just any time here. Just a few episodes ago, maybe just the last episode, I sat here and discussed my bee activity with you, and this one hive is just really nice to watch. It is just so ready to go. To tell you the whole story would require me to tell you the whole story, and the whole story is long and complex. Enough is said that I tell you, that these bees have been on their own for two years. It was last fall that the colony here behind me was open, and I don't remember the last time this nice colony was open.

There's some of you nodding your head saying, "Yes, yes, isn't that weird about bees, the ones that get the most beekeeper attention or the ones that seem to flounder the most?" My plan is to split it. Since I tend to be a textbook beekeeper, and since I have authoritatively told listeners like you so many times that it is really expeditious to buy a coin, and then I would explain how much quicker the colony build up, how quickly they were prepared for winter next season. All that's exactly right, all that's exactly true. Listeners, it depends on where you are with your bees and the relationship you want to have with your bees.

I speculate that younger, more energetic beekeepers would be trying to control swarming, getting ready for supering, exploring ways to extract surplus honey crops. Having done that, having deeply enjoyed it, having been so fulfilled by it all those years ago, it's just not where I am now. I just want bees to be my companion. Now, this is not something they agreed to, you know that. I just want to sit here and watch the bees come and go. In a way, it's almost a mindfulness. The bees are pleasant, the bees are happy, the bees are energetic, the bees are at one with their environment. I'm not doing anything stupid to them. It's just between the bees and the world. I'm not a factor.

If that's where I am now, then I have this thought that I'm really not sure what to do with. What if I took this beehive in three deeps, and if I had to guess, they may be in two of those deeps, and I think the top one's full of honey. What if I just halved it? That term, walkaway splits, that's not my term. That's not one I grew up with. That was a term that I began to hear about 7 or 8, 10 years ago, and it made perfect sense. I wonder who started saying walkaway splits. Do any of you know who initiated that terminology? It's common now. I seriously ask you, can you have walkaway queens? Okay. Am I efficient, or am I lazy or negligent?

This is the deal. This is the real deal. All right. I decide I want queens. Then I've got to go in there and I've got to call a queen producer, a bee supply company, that's about 50 minutes from here. I would have to phone them and say, "Do you have any queens for sale?" Then they may or may not have any at this time, and I suspect that they would tell me when they have some coming in. Then at that point, I would say, "Save three or five of those for me, and I'll go ahead and pay you for them, and then you let me know when they're here."

Then let's just say I wait two, maybe three weeks for those queens to come in, and all this time, this colony is building up, doing its thing, preparing for swarming, and that queen's going to cost me money, a respectable amount of money, and a trip up there to pick it up, her up, them up. I've got no guarantee they're going to be top-notch. I don't think the producers are doing anything but producing the best queens they can. We're always buying a queen and a poke. We never really know what we're getting for sure. We know everyone did their best, but sometimes the best isn't just good enough, and sometimes, it's off the charts good.

Brings out the painful question. What if I just short-circuited all of that prep time and just split this colony in half, and then divided up the surplus honey so that the colony would be back-- Each half would be in two deeps, and the top deep, I'd divide up some of this honey that I've got here. Honey won't be an issue for them. Ironically, I have honey. If I weren't so negligent, I could extract it and have a decent supply of honey extracted, but I'd rather have it in the comb.

I don't need that much more honey anymore, just a few pounds a month. Then I just did this walkaway split and let the queen develop on her own. Let the bees do it. Why wouldn't you do it? There's a lot of reasons why you wouldn't do that. Let's hear from our sponsor. When I get back, I'll try to tell you some of the reasons why this idea has some negative aspects to it.

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Jim: It's easy to get all agog about the bees and how intelligent they are and how instinctual they are and how they're always right and how I'm always in the dark. Yak, yak, yak. I know. Most of that is true. Here's the deal. Those bees can make major mistakes at times. They make mistakes all the time, in fact. Bees get stuck outside in the rain. Bees get hit by a car. Bees get eaten by a spider. Bees pollinate plants that have nectar that's a bit toxic to them. Sometimes bees don't raise the best queens. I don't know why. General reasons, are they-- Something went wrong in the hive? The climate? The weather? Got into an insecticide? Who knows?

Just because the queens raise their own queen doesn't mean that it's going to be a dynamic queen. I think the bees are making the best decision they can at the moment for which of those larvae they're going to take and to subsequently turn into a queen. All right. All right. The other big reason for not letting them raise themselves a queen is just the matter of timing. Sitting here with the bees, not a book in sight, not any reference in sight, doing this from memory, and for me that's a dangerous thing, takes about 16 days for a queen to emerge.

She's out for about five days or so, roaming the hive, fighting with rivals, struggling for her life, and let's just say this hypothetical queen is successful. Then, within a few days, depending on the weather, she takes mating flights, and then she's got to successfully find drone congregation areas. Then those congregation areas need to be populated, and she needs to find anywhere from at least 1 to sometimes 18 to 20 drones before she has the seminal fluid that she needs for her short lifespan. All this time, she's got to not get lost, she's got to avoid the weather, she's got to avoid birds and other environmental predators. It's a risky deal.

Then she comes back after what has been now about five days to a week of brawling with others and out-taking these nuptial flights. Then there's what, three days, five days before she begins to lay? That really depends on the nurse bees preparing cells for her and able to feed her with the food and the hormonal content that she needs. Then beyond that then, we're up to what? 16 and 5, 21, 5 more days, 27. Let's just say 30 days, and then after everything is going and she's got a really nice pattern she's laying out, then 21 days from that she'll be getting new workers for this colony.

Then by then the colony has weakened itself, it's run down, a lot of the bees have aged, so there's going to have to be a balance to maintain between the number of larvae that can be produced and the number of nurse bees that are to care for them. Then, after, listeners, what is about 45, sometimes as long as 50 days, this colony is back to a queen rot colony. If I'm talking to you here, the last few days of March, April, May, I'm looking over toward the third week of May or so before this colony that I gave this queen to is ready to go again. What did I say by not making the trip? What did I say by not going through the headache to find the queens and getting them and getting them introduced?

Honestly, I don't have any better guarantee that a natural queen is better than a caged queen. You see my conundrum? Then there's my personal energy and life and the money. My energy is more important to me right now. Since I am good at making promises and plans, and then not always following through expeditiously, the simplest thing for me to do is to come out here and split them like I told you. Now, I could only do that if I'm a beekeeper, where I am on this beekeeping journey I'm on. If I wanted a honey crop, then that's a sure way not to get it.

Because the bees just don't have the population, they miss the season with the right population to go out and bring out all this surplus honey, build a comb, cap it, do all they got to do. Not an easy job. What I'm agreeing to do is by making this walkaway queen-type split. I'm probably agreeing to a minimal to no honey crop surplus. Here's the real deal. I don't really care about that anymore. I don't really have a good place to extract now. I have to set up in my shop. It makes a huge mess. It's not enjoyable for me. It's not beekeeping. Having said that, those of you who still love to do it, I support you 100% in doing it. It's just not me now.

As an aside, I would like to have enough honey to put in small jars just to give tokens to friends and people at church and wherever. Just something to hand out like a typical old man beekeeper. How about another shot? Got three colonies to split. What if I just tinker since I'm just playing with bees anyway? The main thing I want to do to have bees for is to have bees to talk to you about them, to have bees to photograph, to have bees to contemplate. I'm no longer having any interest in moving bees for pollination or producing massive amounts of honey. Again, again, again, if that's your thing, that's where you are. That's just not where I am right now.

How about this? How about if I just tinker and make a walkaway split, and how about I do go buy a queen and then make a split, a big split, maybe as much as a half, 10 frames, but at least 5 to 6 frames, and I buy a queen or 2. One of the colonies does its own thing, and another colony gets a nice queen that probably was shipped to me from somewhere in California. That would be entertaining. Nothing about it is scientific. Nothing about it is analytical. There's just not enough numbers there to draw any conclusions. There's just enough to play with, and that's all I'm doing is just tinkering here.

You see, the whole fundamental reason for me having this conversation with you is that this bee colony and the one behind me is not only alive, it's thriving. It's alive and thriving based on its own biological characteristics and behaviors. [unintelligible 00:16:36] Week. These two colonies that I'm talking about survived on their own for the last two years and are now doing really nicely, productive foraging, growing. If I let them raise their own queen, do I acquire any of those genetics and their naturally produced queen? No disrespect intended at all to any queen producer anyway. I don't know that that's what they're looking for.

I think they're looking in many cases for things like color, for disease resistance, for behavior. I'm just looking for bees that can keep themselves alive, pretty much maintained by themselves. The one reason I'm sitting here in my chair rocking slowly, looking at the bees and thinking is that if I just did this split and let the bees do their own thing, would I slowly incorporate some stock characteristic that would let a future beehive have some degree of survivability the way these colonies have had for the last two years? There's that. I don't know, listeners.

Part of me says do it. You can do it tomorrow morning. Wouldn't take two hours to come out here and light a smoker and suit up and rip into them. You don't have to find the queen. You don't have to do anything. You can just make these splits, even things out, and call it done, and then classically walk away from it. If I do follow the option of going out, meeting people, talking, seeing old friends, picking up a couple of queens while I'm there, then you got to come back. You got to find the queen in the other colony. Be sure she's separated. You need to wait for a day or two to let the half you split out that's queenless realize that they're queenless and then go through the queen introduction process.

By then, I'm into early June already. I don't know what I'm going to do. Doesn't matter. I wish you were here to talk with me and tell me that, "Oh, you've gone over the hill. You're too lazy now. You should be out here ripping, tearing, pulling, smoking." I hope that some of you would say, "I see where you are. I feel your arthritic pain. Why don't you do the simplest thing possible just to keep bees back there, just to stay in the scope of beekeeping? I'm winding down in time here. I had another completely disassociated thought. I'm being overrun by multiflora rose. Totally different subject. Just for a few minutes, just to antagonize people.

I hope it doesn't antagonize you. I was wondering if I can hook my little tractor to those things and pull them out of the ground, or if I should cut them and then use herbicides and all the things I don't want to do anymore. Then I want to rip into big, nice beehives. Then I thought, is there any comparison between multiflora rose and their weed-like aggressive qualities and this honeybee hive that I'm looking at with non-native insects that are really flying out, doing a great pollination job. In the process, some people would say that they're dislocating native pollinators and suppressing native pollinators.

I don't know how true that is. I wonder if a weed or a pest is just in the eye of the beholder. While I'm sitting here just adoring my exotic introduced honeybees, I'm absolutely despising my exotic introduced multifloral rose. That's interesting. One's good, one's bad. Both are non-native. What's that got to do with queens? Absolutely, nothing. Absolutely, nothing. I just want to divide the colonies up. I want to keep 5 to 10 colonies back here. That's about all I want now. I just want to enjoy beekeeping and, importantly, I don't really want to have to work a lot, not that I'm lazy. Swear, I'm not lazy. I don't think I am. I just don't have the stamina to do the things that I used to do.

If you're so inclined, let me know if you've let colonies produce their own queens and if you bought queens, and if you have any idea of personal comparisons. If enough of you write me, we'll have a conversation about it. Until we talk some other time, surely next week, I'm Jim telling you bye.

[00:21:38] [END OF AUDIO]