Honey bees are incredibly organized creatures.  When a queen dies or isn’t laying eggs efficiently anymore, the worker bees build enlarged queen cells, feeding the larvae royal jelly to create several new queens. 

Ideally you don’t want this to happen in an established hive, as it takes about 30 days for the new queens to hatch , battle the other queens, and start laying eggs.  Meanwhile all the other bees (which live about 4-5 weeks) are aging and dying off.  The hive stalls until the new queen’s eggs mature and start foraging, and you will have low honey volume in the fall.  So what to do?  Order a new queen online!

The new queen  arrives with several attendants in a little wood or plastic chamber with mesh for air.  The end of the tube is filled with hard candy.  The entire thing is put into the hive box.  The bees attack this foreign queen and eat the candy to get to her over the next two days.  By the time they get through, they have become accustomed to her pheromones and accept her.

Although the queen is quite large, it’s still hard to find her to check on her in the hive, so we paint a little dot of colour on her back for easy spotting.  Sometimes she arrives already painted.  Beekeepers use a universal annual colour coding system so you know how old the queen is by the colour of her dot.  Unlike worker bees, a queen can live for up to 5 years!

Checking on the health of the queen is one of the main reasons beekeepers open up the hive every 2 weeks.  We need to make sure she is thriving and doing her job!