Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Mated Queens Return Home With A White Package

Where to start? I am so excited that I hardly can take down the grin off my face :D And why should I? Let it stay there for this day deserves it.

I went to my beekeeping mentor's farm to help him with cutting grass so he would later on open his hives and show me a thing or two ;)
Most of Rolf's hives are with new Queen Cells which are to start emerging these days (most hives died in the winter) so he wanted to see how it looks inside the hives.

He opened the first hive and we started looking for Queen Cells and found one which was open; the Queen Emerged !!! so we started looking for her ... we went throughout the whole hive looking on each and every single frame twice but to no avail :( she wasnt there so Rolf concluded she is outside performing her mating flight.
And just when he decided to close the hive I SAW HER !!! :D there she just arrived with the Drone's mating organ still hanging out of her "back"! Then she disapeared into the darkness of the hive.

And then we opened the 3rd hive the same happened again! Open Queen Cell and suddenly there she was with Drone's sex organ hanging out of her bum :) I went for the camera but one House Bee pulled the white sex organ out of the Queen at that very moment :( I missed my oportunity to document this :(

"WOW" said Rolf, "what a lucky guy you are to witness such an event. I saw Queens who just returned from their mating flights still with Drone's sex organ in her body only twice in my 30 years of beekeeping and you saw it twice in a single day!" he said with clear excitenment. By his reaction I felt this being a special event to witness and a rare one too. He said that some of his beekeeper friends never saw this in their 40 years of beekeeping.
 Rolf picking out a few Drone larvae to check for Varroa Mites. He was surrprised not to find even one in all of his hives. The huge protruding cells are Drone Cells and the closed flat cells are the Capped Honey cells (to the left), the open cells are the Uncapped Honey.

 Marked Queens surrounded by the Working Bees. The cells are full with developing Larvae and Eggs.



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