Believe it or not but you can buy a Queen. She comes by post with a few attendants. I placed the order on Tuesday for delivery Friday. H said the posty was amazed and had been showing all his posty mates what he had to deliver. H was not overly impressed with being collared by the posty to take delivery of a small package with a big yellow label announcing "Live Queen Bee". I asked H to bring the Queen to my office so I could look after her, the Queen Bee not H. H's face was a picture when she handed over the package. She had summoned all her strength to bring the little package in the car and pick it up to give it to me.
I was chuffed to receive the packaged and opened it carefully. I knew what to expect. H and Eddie, a colleague, were not so sure. Inside the envelope was a wooden box with a mesh front. Behind the mesh a Queen and a few attendant worker bees. At one end of the wooden cell some sugar fondant as food. The Bees were buzzing about but settled down once the cell was out of the envelop and sheltered from the bright lights in the office. I was distracted for the rest of Friday. I had decided that the Queen would be introduced to her new home that evening but the rain but paid to that plan. I would have to wait until Saturday.
Saturday afternoon, after lottie fettling I went to the apiary. I checked both hives. The blue one is OK but the cedar one definitely struggling. Lucky I had a Queen in my overalls pocket. I rearranged the frames so the frames with most empty cells were near each other. I shook the bees off the frames to stir them up a bit then when the brood box was reassembled of sprinkled a generous helping of sugar syrup over the frames. The idea was that the bees would start to fan the hive scent, as they always do when disturbed, as signal to collect the flying back to the hive. Slopping sugar syrup starts the bees tidying up by licking the syrup from the frames, comb and each other. The Queen would be covered in syrup to and to act of cleaning up would spread her pheromones throughout the hive. I dosed the Queen in syrup and opened the wooden cell. The Queen flew onto my finger for a moment. My heart stopped but before I could react she dived for the "safety" of the dark space between the frames. I a moment she was gone. I put the hive back together and sat in the long grass front of the hive for a worry. Would she be accepted or would she be killed and expelled from the hive. Both bad results since it would be a waste of money and the queenless hive would remain.
To distract myself I tidied up then took a walk up the meadow, found a spot and watched the river Mease rush by with the Damsel flies flitting this way and that way. Forty minutes had passed by so I went back to the hive and dismantled it. I pulled out the frames I thought it likely she would be on. To my dismay I saw a cluster of very agitated bees. The ball of bees was a clear sign they were killing something. Another frame another bee cluster. I brushed the bees aside with my finger to find at he centre of this ball of twenty bees was a very unhappy worker. She was different to the hive bees so I took her to be one of the attendants. I checked the other cluster, another worker as its centre. Having pulled a few frames out I saw more dead and dieing bees on the hive floor. The mortuary bees were heaving the bodies to the hive entrance. I all this chaos I did not find the Queen. I pulled out a few more frames and found a big cluster of several hundred bees under one of the ledges. I brushed the bees aside even so gently and caught a fleeting glimpses of the Queen. She was not being mobbed so I figure the workers were clustering as they do when they swarm. I am hopeful that when I check the hive midweek I will find eggs. That will mean she has been accepted. Fingers crossed.
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