Bee Buzz

KONA QUEENS

It never fails. Our new queens arrived from Kona on a beautiful, warm April morning. The forecast called for a temperature drop of about 25 degrees and an upslope condition. In the Colorado front range, that means snow, lot’s of it. And so the scramble was on. There wasn’t sufficient time to get the new queens installed in their new homes, so the name of the game is making them comfortable for several days. This is done by building a queen bank – and if done correctly it’s like a few days at the Ritz for the queens. You’ve probably heard that there can be only one queen per hive, but in fact there is a way to have several (caged) queens in a single hive. The secret is to populate a hive with young nurse bees and be absolutely sure that no queen exists. Then place the caged queens in the hive and the nurse bees will tend all the queens – feeding them through the screened covers on their cages. After that long trip from Kona, the new queens are well served by a few days of R & R prior to heading up new colonies and laying 1200 to 2000 eggs a day! Oh, by the way, the forecast was accurate – it snowed all night and most of the next day. Two days later it was warm and beautiful. I peeked into the queen bank and found lots of bees attending the queens so all looked well and I began the process of preparing their new homes...