Greetings and thanks to everyone who responded to my New Year's Eve posting on this site.

One correspondent thinks I am pessimistic about the frequency of queen piping so I'd better explain how I came to the conclusion.

Firstly, it was my personal experience.  With an average 8 hives over 20 years, I heard it only 3 times all told.  That works out at once every 7 years so if I'd only had 2 hives it would have been 4 x 7 = once every 28 years.

Secondly, whenever I talk to an audience of beekeepers, I take a show of hands of how many have actually heard queen piping, live, in their own apiary and the usual response is 50%.  Then I ask how many reckon to hear it at least once every year and about 5 or 6 hands go up.  The next enquiry discovers that these all have more than 20 hives.  So, if you need 20 hives to hear it every year, with only 2 hives you could wait 10 years.

Taking this figure of 10 years and my experience figure of 28 years, the average is about 20. QED.

Queen piping is the sound made when one queen detects the proximity of another.  Hence it only occurs around swarming time; for a given colony, this might be a few days every 2 years which is why you are lucky to catch it.

Eddie Woods recognised three types of piping and could distinguish between that of the old queen, that of an emerged virgin and that of a virgin still in the cell.  Since the swarm has usually gone before any virgin has emerged, you do not hear the old queen very often.  Eddie heard it because the departure of the swarm had been delayed by bad weather. In 1949 he did a talk on BBC Radio when he broadcast the sound of 'murder in the beehive' when an old queen exchanged piping with an unemerged virgin, then tore open the cell and stung her to death.  UK beekeepers can borrow a tape of this and others of Eddie's broadcast talks from BBKA.

In my previous posting I explained that the note of a bee sound is controlled by the wing motor. A worker bee in flight produces a sound near middle B (250Hz).  Queen piping is higher because the queen does not flap her wings in the normal way but sideways across her back, like a pair of scissors.  This raises the resonant frequency.  The virgin in the cell only has stumps to vibrate and this produces a higher note still. Don't you wish you had paid more attention in your physics lessons at school?

By the way, I forgot to mention that the book published by Northern Bee Books is called 'Listen to the Bees' and it is in their series called 'Beekeeping in a Nutshell'.  In the UK it costs £1.60 incl postage but I have no idea what they charge overseas customers.

Best Wishes.  Rex Boys.