Finding the Queen- Beekeeping in Sweden

    Ok, to the present: For the past week or so I have lived in southern Sweden with a beekeeper and his family. I’m here through an organization called WWOOF, which places interested volunteers with organic farms around the world. In exchange for a place to live and meals, the wwoofer works and learns about farming on the job. A little bit atypically for wwoofing, I am learning and doing beekeeping.

     

     At this time of year, the honey harvesting is finishing, bees are winding down for the season, and the beekeeper turns to a list of other tasks. This week we have been doing a lot of queen exchanges- in hives that have been marked with undesirable traits (primarily aggressiveness, or the tendency to swarm), we find and kill the queen, and replace her with a queen bred from known pedigree to lack those traits.

     Basic bee biology: in a hive there is one queen, many tens of thousands of female worker bees, and a variable but lesser amount of male drones. The queen is in charge. She lays all the eggs, fertilized or not to become a worker or drone. The hive centers on this basic function- other things such as pollination and honey collection are for the ancillary purpose of eating.  Basically (as I can tell to be the case) the beekeeper tends the bees to take their honey, and may feed them with sugar water so they survive the winter.

can you spot the queen? she's marked

We set out both yesterday and today to far-flung locations of groups of hives (David has maybe a dozen hives in about a dozen places? It adds up to a lot of driving because optimally productive bees are picky about location). After my two or three days of exposure to bees in frames (wooden frames of wax cells filled with honey, pollen, brood, or larva) David saw fit to equip me with a bee suit, grabber (sort of forceps for grabbing frames from the hive), and knife (more of a little pry-bar/chisel, for prying apart things stuck together with wax or honey), and set me on a hive to find the queen.

     I warned him from the first one, “David, I am not very optimistic.” He replied, “Well, optimism is the first thing.” Ok, great. When I ask for more identifying traits of the queen, besides the fact that she is bigger, he says unhelpfully- “Well, maybe her abdomen looks different. Also, the bees around her will act differently.” Ugh. The strategy is to start with the frames (ten in a hive, housing about 30,000 bees altogether this time of year) that have the most brood- or unhatched bees, because the queen will have been there recently. Additionally, when the beekeeper reaches to grab the frame where the queen is located, the bees may start to make a different noise, agitated at her disturbance. A bee colony is freakily connected, in a way reminiscent of the Borg from Star Trek (I’m sure, an intentional reference).

David and I, suited up

     But when it comes down to it, you are looking for one bee, almost identical to the others, in tens of thousands. I clung to the method and dove in, enjoying the cloud of bees that curiously (but not aggressively) rose around my whole body. Four frames in, I spot her. !!! Lucky chance, I reason. David congratulates me, hands over the clip to catch her, and takes her back to kill her himself (tacitly but considerately not forcing that task on me). We take one of the good queens and release her into a little box tacked to a frame filled with older brood about to be born. Those bees are most likely to accept and take care of the queen, instead of attacking her. In a few days, after her pheromones have spread, she will chew her way out of the little plastic box and reign at large.

     Tentatively energized, I move onto the next marked hive. Sure enough, I find this queen as well. A bit cheaply- she was marked with a blue dot from a previous experiment. David is struggling with his the second hive, having given up on the first. He sends me to the first hive to give it a try. Sure enough, a few minutes later I spot her, strutting around on the third frame.

     And I begin to get it- really, the queen’s main point of distinction is that she is unpinpointably different. When scanning frames with thousands of bees one can’t be assessing minor differences in abdomen length or color. It’s easier, and more practical, just to look and feel, because ultimately she will make herself known. No single difference will jump out, but everything about her together will shout different. How she walks, her general demeanor, the way she interacts with the cells and those around her. She is also bigger, and often colored differently (but not consistently differently), but these factors stick out less.

     Pleased with my realization, I move to help David with the fourth hive, nearing a stage of impossibility. At a certain point, the strategy will no longer work if the bees have become agitated enough to hide the queen in some corner where we will never find her. Instead, we toss all the bees out (maybe you can imagine the ensuing cloud), and set the hive back up. The worker bees will all find their way back the hive, but the queen won’t fit in the entrance. The worker bees will instead find the new queen, protected in her box until they accept her as theirs.

     Unfazed by this last submission, I go home pleased with my modest victories of the day. David sensibly withholds too much admiration, because the next afternoon I prove my skills to be significantly subject to chance. Nonetheless, I am pleased with the strides I have made in this miniscule field of queen-location, with hopes of continuing improvement.