It’s spring and that means the queen games have begun. Every healthy hive is rushing to make as many new queens as it possibly can so they can send the old queen and half their comrades to a probable death by swarm. Yes, only 20% of swarms survive to establish a new colony. And while that low success rate is good for our soffits it’s not so great for the bees or for you.

This post is not going to explain everything about queens or swarms. But perhaps it will be useful for you and help you recognize what’s going on in your colony.

Do the bees ‘like’ the queen?

The first video is a caged queen exposed to bees in a hive that might be queenless. The cage was placed on the top bars and the bees quickly covered it. Do they ‘like’ her or not?

In this case the bees are easily brushed off the cage with a finger. If a colony has a queen the workers would consider the caged queen an interloper and would try to kill her. Since they didn’t do that the queen was placed in the colony between two frames with the wire facing out so the colony could feed her, and get used to her pheromones. She was released about a week later by removing the cork from the cage and letting her leave the cage and go down into the brood nest. Yes the video could be a better.

What do virgin queens do?

If you do have a swarm you’ll have virgin queens. If you weren’t cutting out cells to reduce the number you might have many virgins in the hive at once. This is not a great situation. Virgin queens will fight each other, sometimes leaving just one who goes on to lead the colony. However, it seems that they can also recruit a swarm and follow the first swarm with the old queen. Last season we saw many hives go this route and ‘swarm out’, issuing multiple swarms that eventually left the colonies too depleted to thrive.

This video depicts a virgin queen and follows her as she pipes her war cry trying to find her rivals and destroy them.