Who's your daddy?

There was only one thing to do with my suicidal bees - throw them out!
So I did.
Well to be truthful I threw them out of their hive on to the ground in front of another hive. Initially they started walking off in all directions and some got airborne, but after a few minutes half a dozen had found their way into the new hive. I watched with interest to see if the guard bees would attack the intruders, but there was no challenge. Instead the new arrivals sat in the entrance, stuck their tails in the air and started beating their wings, sending a scent from their glands back to the others. Sure enough within a couple of minutes all the other bees had turned around and were walking into 'their' new home. So now I have a colony containing both the suicidal and the non-suicidal bees, and the funny thing is that even though they are all mixed up, I can tell which is which, .... and it's nothing to do with happy faces.
Bees don't all look the same. My suicidal bees have almost black bodies with barely visible black stripes, whereas my happy bees have yellowy-brown bodies. The suicidal bees will die out over the next few weeks but in the meantime they can help with foraging and housekeeping duties. Gradually the colony will revert to just yellow bees again. Or may be not, it depends on who's the daddy.
When a virgin queen goes on her mating flight she is impregnated by several drones and receives millions of sperm cells which are stored in packets inside her body. Those sperm have to last for the rest of the queen's reproductive life, some 3 -4 years, and as the months go by some packets of sperm are used up and new packets are started.
New packets of sperm mean a new daddy, so it is not unusual to see the look and characteristics of a colony change over the months; same mummy - different daddy.
Right now my happy bees are yellow, which suggests daddy may be of Mediterranean extraction, and my suicidal bees are black, suggesting daddy may be of Scottish descent...
'Nuf said.

Suicide is painless

My bees are suicidal. Seriously, they have a death-wish and I'm beginning to suspect that chronic depression among the world's honey bee population is the reason for their decline. I rest my thesis on the following observation:

The bees I received from my bee-buddy were queenless and without a laying queen the colony was going to die out over the next couple of months. Fortunately I had raised a new queen and she was laying well in her little box, so it was time to introduce her to the queenless colony. You would think they would welcome her as their savior, but queen introduction is risky. So I placed her in a little cage to protect her from the workers and plugged up the exit hole with a wodge of icing sugar fondant. The idea is that the workers eat their way through the icing sugar and by the time they reach the queen they have got used to her smell and moreover are feeling too full of sugar to have the energy to harm her. Instead they start feeding her and within a day she is out and about in the colony and shortly thereafter she should be laying.

Except she wasn't. I opened up the hive a week later and there were hardly any eggs to be seen. So I hunted around to try and find her without success, until I noticed a bunch of bees in a huddle...

Huddles mean trouble. I poked my finger in the huddle to try and separate the bees and sure enough, there in the middle was the queen. They were killing her by 'balling' her, a process that involves smothering their victim and vibrating their bodies to generate so much heat that she would die of hyperthermia.

There was nothing I could do - she was finished, and so is the entire colony. 

The queen is dead - long live the queen!

Five weeks ago I was looking through someone's hive when we came across this:

Those six elongated structures hanging off the bottom of the comb are queen cells, each one containing a large grub. The three longest cells had just been sealed by the bees so I knew that over the next seven days those grubs would metamorphose into queen bees ... and promptly die!
The reason is simple - there can only be one queen. The old queen (and mother of these queen cells) had swarmed with 10,000 worker bees earlier that day, confident in the knowledge that she was leaving one of these developing queens to take over.
But only one, because the first queen to emerge promptly kills her unborn sisters by stinging them while they are still in their cells. So because most of these potential queens were doomed I didn't hesitate in gently cutting out some of the sealed cells and taking them home to put in the airing cupboard. I was confident they would hatch, but without nursery bees to feed and look after them they would soon perish. The problem was I didn't have enough bees of my own but I knew someone who did....
My beekeeping buddy has some very strong colonies so we shook a mug full of young bees into a tiny hive, then carefully inserted one of the queen cells between the frames using a paper clip for support, and added some fondant icing sugar to keep them fed.
Here's a picture of the little hive sitting on top of a normal hive. Within a few days the queen hatched and despite the poor weather she managed to get mated because when I looked a few days ago she was laying.
Which is just as well, because that hive of bees my beekeeping buddy gave me last week doesn't have a queen!