Part Fourteen: Every New Beginning Comes from Some Other Beginning’s End

It’s been a wild and crazy ride, but my “year in the life” journey is wrapping up! If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I have a lot to learn. Even after a year, our bees are both astonishing and confusing us. The past month was a bit of a waiting game, but even our plans for that were wiped off the map. 

Kha-bee-si attempts to requeen post-swarm

Spoiler alert: She failed.

After half the hive swarmed and landed on the red maple in our yard, where we caught it, Kha-bee-si was left queenless. Five days after the swarm, we checked in on her and found about 36 queen cells, with some already chewed through. Shockingly, we also saw two virgin queens running around! They were doing well… or so we thought (that’s our tagline for our entire beekeeping experience).

I went in to take a look around 10 days later. No eggs. No young larvae. The weather had been a bit cold and rainy, so I figured the new queen just hadn’t quite hardened and started laying yet, or she was erratically laying and I missed seeing the eggs. Another 7 days later, Tim went in and found the hive full of nectar, pollen, capped honey, and not a single egg or section of capped brood. All those queen cells and virgin queens and none survived to the laying stage!

Luckily, it’s queen rearing season and we have a variety of queens for sale at Betterbee. I picked up a blue-marked Kutik’s queen from western New York. After dinner, Tim and I pulled a couple frames of brood from the swarmed hive and put that brood and the new queen in Kha-bee-si’s hive. Before “installing” the new queen, we set her cage on top of the frames to triple-check for queenlessness. The resident bees happily crawled all over the cage, feeding her and her attendants, and welcoming them with open antennae.

I'm not looking at them, mom. Even though I know you saw me nudging the cage with my paw 10 seconds before this photo was taken.

Check out this brood pattern in our swarmed hive! They're doing crazy well and we're so proud of their success.

Time to rename the hives and (not) make plans for the future

Things are getting dicey with our naming conventions… Our original Kha-bee-si queen swarmed last June, so then we had Kha-bee-si II, who swarmed and is now in the hive across the yard from the original location. Now we have a brand-new queen in the original Kha-bee-si location. We’re brainstorming new names by location and not by the queen going forward.

Our goals for the rest of the year are simple: keep queens laying and keep Varroa destructor mite levels low in both hives. We’re also hoping to get enough honey for our wedding favors, to represent our bee children at our wedding. We’ve been keeping the wax we clean off the frames as well and look forward to rendering it into candles in the future.

Final thoughts

We absolutely love being bee parents. It hasn’t been an easy ride, but it’s definitely been interesting. We’re both still learning each time we crack the propolis seal on a hive and can’t wait to see what these crazy creatures have in store for us next!

Your Betterbee-ginner Beekeeper,
Quinn