I'm wondering what can damage a queen this way...
We had to requeen my neighbour's queenless hive (for reasons too
frustrating and embarrassing to relate here), and after the cage had
been in the hive for a week, the queen was still in it, along with a
couple of attendants (but fewer than she has started with). Some of
the hive workers surrounded the cage but seemed calm and loose - they
came off fairly readily when I shook them off. The queen at this point
was moving around normally back and forth in the cage.
This is a different type of cage to the one we've seen in the past;
this one has two candy sections, side by side at one end of the cage,
one short and one long. The bees had removed all of the candy from
the short candy section, but it looked as though the entrance to that
section from the cage might be too narrow for the queen to pass through.
Some of the candy had been removed (from both inside and outside
the cage) from the long candy section, but it was still blocked.
(When we later examined the empty cage closely, we found out that
the longer candy section also has a wider entranceway than the
other, so presumably the queen is intended to exit on that side,
and if we had waited another week, most likely the bees would have
finished clearing the candy and released the queen in the normal manner.)
Anyway, we figured that one week was enough time for the bees to
accept the queen, and they did not seem aggressive towards her,
so we decided to go ahead and release her. We slid the cover
off far enough to make a gap, lowered the cage near the open top
of the hive, and sure enough the queen came out... and flew off!
I will spare you a description of how foolish we felt. :-(
But: she returned! Within a half hour, my neighbour found her on
the ground near the side of the hive (she was marked, which helped us
a lot). At first she looked dead, but I saw a little bit of movement,
so I picked her up by a wing and put her on the landing board,
hoping that she would be found and nursed back to life by the workers.
We then watched for quite a long time, probably half an hour in
my case. She eventually attracted about a dozen workers. It was
hard (for me) to tell what they were doing, but there weren't enough
of them to ball her, and sometimes they seemed to line up around
her in the typical fashion of attendants. I noticed only one bee
acting in a way that might be aggressive, in that she was on the
queen's back and had her abdomen tightly curled in, but I couldn't
tell if she was attempting to sting. But overall, it *looked*
like acceptance - so why didn't the queen enter the hive?
At first we hoped it was just weakness, and that she would get fed
and recover her energy; certainly after a few minutes, we saw leg and
antenna movements which were encouraging. But she never did enter the
hive, and twice fell off the landing board, though it didn't seem to
me that the attending bees were making any concerted effort to push
her in that direction. Finally I picked her up, and took this video:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/bQSDYWLN6cNcUawc7
In it, the queen is on her back trying unsuccessfully to right
herself, with both front legs waving, but the middle and back legs
waving only on one side, as though the other side is paralyzed.
Also, in the still photo, you can see that there's something wrong
with the wings, in that they are not positioned symmetrically.
When I put the queen down right side up, she was unable to crawl.
This is why she could not enter the hive, and of course even if
we put her in, she would not be able to crawl around and lay eggs.
So, she's toast. :-(
I'm just wondering how she got injured. Have any of you seen an
injury that looked like this, or have any idea how it might occur?
She seemed comfortably mobile in the cage, and she was able to fly
when released, so presumably something bad happened in the half-hour
after her release.
Anne, dismayingly ignorant backyard beekeeper, Montreal.
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