Piping queens that toot and quack

LA Backwards Beekeeper Marianne recently posted to our Yahoo group that she'd heard a newly hatched queen making "piping" sounds inside the hive. I had never heard of this and was totally confused. Fortunately Marianne followed up with some attached text (quoted from BeeSource, originally in Scientific American) that tells more of the story:

Naturalists have long known that queens inside the hive emit two kinds of sound, called "tooting" and "quacking." A close analysis of these sounds and the circumstances of their emission now provides the strongest evidence that bees use sound to convey specific messages.

Tooting is the regal identification of a virgin queen soon after she has emerged from the cell in which she developed. A hive cannot tolerate more than one queen at a time. In a hive that lacks a queen several queen-bearing cells develop simultaneously in a comb, but one matures earlier than the others. Once this queen has emerged, has hardened and has become steady on her legs, she proceeds to visit other queen cells, tear them open and sting to death their potential but not yet mature queens. Often, however, the worker bees do not allow her to dispose of all her potential rivals in this way; they bar her from some of the cells. She then begins to toot and continues to do so day and night, perhaps for a week or more. Her tooting rises in intensity and sometimes can be heard more than 10 feet from the hive.

There's a video of piping queens after the jump.

Know your Queen cells

Kirk writes:

I have noticed that new beekeepers have a hard time telling if a Queen cell is a queen cell. Now the books say it looks like a Peanut, and they're right. Here are some queen cells with some peanuts for all the New beekeepers to see. Notice the size—they are long, almost 3/4 of a inch.

kirkobeeo

Bees in the trees

Backwards Beekeepers Dennis and Steven did a tree hive removal recently, and Dennis has the whole story on his blog:

Steve did most of the bee collecting. The new beekeeper Ed G. was filming the event for posterity and jumping in to help when he could. The neighbors came over for a glance from time to time but most kept a good distance.

Feral Hive - New Home - Redondo Beach (The Buzz In The Dale)

Tie bees are not my bees

A few weeks back, Kirk and Russell brought the railroad tie bees over to our house to live. They plopped the bee-filled hunk of wood on top of a nuc box and we left them alone to get comfortable.

We decided to cut them out this weekend. Russell started the cut out with a regular saw, but soon graduated to power tools. It was a long & sweaty endeavor.



















It was kind of neat inside the railroad tie, but most of the bees had absconded and the comb was full of wax moths. There was a little bit of honey. but it was filthy and looked old. The whole thing went into the trash.



















We're hoping to catch a new swarm in the spring. We're happy to have one healthy hive and a bunch of bee friends.

And the train kept rolling

Remember the railroad-tie bees? Well, Kirk and I headed up to Solano Garden, where they'd been parked, to pick them up and give them a new home.

Here's Kirk's ant-barrier system that protects his bees.



Kirk used window screen and duct tape to seal up the tie for transportation.




This is like Christmas for me.



Here are the bees in their new Silver Lake home. Once they've had a while to orient themselves, we'll undertake a cut-out to get them into a proper hive box.

Bee Hive Ruins

This week we had the first storm of the season with buckets of rain and pretty high winds. I had to go up to Santa Clara for work the next day and while walking from the office to the hotel I found the remains of a bee hive on the ground with no bees in sight.

The pictures were taken at dusk with my phone so they aren't the greatest quality but you can still see the freshly drawn comb, brood and honey if you click them to enlarge.


The thing that struck me is that bees are everywhere and that it is preposterous to restrict people from keeping them in their backyards.


In the picture above you can see a snail eating either brood or honey from the comb.

The pieces were all sitting in or around a driveway so my guess is that they are all squashed flat by now.