Part II of the story.

I was thinking…what a waste of lives! Should I simply let these queens fight
and one survive? Why not recover them and let them mate in mating nucs? But
Monday is memorial day…Around 3:31 pm I went back to my lab, picked up some
queen cages, and came back to try to find my virgins…I wish I had thought
about this the first time, or I could have gathered some small bottles at
home to contain them…if I did that I would have gathered more than 10 of them.

I started at hive A, the frame I introduced with 6-7 cells only had one
queen cell intact, the rest all emerged…so this colony should have 2 (I
transferred them) + 4-5 (emerged between 2:20 and 4 pm). I recovered the one
in the cell (like before she started running when I opened the cell), and
found 2 more. I killed one by accident (the JZBZ cage cover wont snap back,
and I tried too hard and the whole cage bent and the poor virgin died).  In
hive B I recovered 4! One of them running on the bottom board.  I make one
more split form B, so this would be the 6th colony (colony F).  I finished
around 5:30 pm. I spent 2 hrs recovering 7 queens (one dead), if 5 of them
successfully mate, it would be $65.   I am pretty sure I missed 50% in hive
A (4 cells + 2 transferred should be 6 queens) , so I do not worry about
that one. Hive B has some larvae left (and should have 2-3 queens that I
missed), and I took a frame with eggs to hive F.  So all the colonies should
be ok (as long as they have eggs, if no virgins are in there, they will
raise more emergency cells to raise more queens).  I got curious and opened
the swarm hive (D) to see if there are multiple queens, but did not even see
the one I saw in the morning.  By then I was tired and did not want to go
through the frames a 2nd or 3rd time.

Oh, another strange queen cell I found. This was in hive B, I opened and
there is a drone (still pink eyed) pupa!  This time I got a photo of it. Yet
another cell had a dead larva (pretty small), but the cell was sealed…It
looked like too small a larva to spin a cocoon yet…so why sealed so early by
workers?

I still have a grant to write, so I had to turn down Larry’s invitation to
go fishing (I had never fished in his pond before).  He said he has caught
basses up to 24 inches. Not bad.  I got a rain check though.

This time I got stung about 5 times…

What I learned today: 

1). Virgin queens do not kill each other right away, at least not the first
few hours. They do not bother to open other queen cells either. I do not
know if we know the time line of how soon they do that, 

2). Bees do make mistakes, workers develop inside queen cells (why? Too old
a larva to become a queen?), and they because normal worker cells are
slightly tilted upward (against gravity), of course they would face the
wrong direction during pupation, so they die (why not turn around? I guess
instinctively they want to chew the upper direction). 

And 3). Drones develop inside queen cells! Workers apparently made a mistake
here, thinking the larva was a female, but actually it was a him!  I wonder
if the drones are “normal” or not, since royal jelly (assuming that he was
fed royal jelly since the cell was pointing downward and also had the queen
cell sculpture outside) are slightly different from “drone jelly”.

Zachary 5:55 pm.
 

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