We are a group of bees and humans working at Sri Mata Amritanandamayi's Toronto Centre. Our goal is to support local bee populations and pollination. Our beekeeping is organic and in tune with our environment. We are happy to share information with you and hopefully, one day, a taste of our honey. It's divine.
Today we continued working in our largest hive -- the hive in which last week we discovered that the queen was laying eggs above the queen excluder! Markjan explains how we address that issue along with the beginning of our honey harvest for the season.
Our newest bee sevite, Ashwini, does an excellent job of assisting Markjan in these tasks.
We went out to the hives to see whether the two new queens had been accepted or not. In the first hive, this is what happened...
We then checked on the second hive. As we took each frame out from the boxes below the queen excluder and inspected it for larvae and eggs, our hope dropped a notch. In two boxes, absolutely nothing. We were quite puzzled, though, because the population in this very large hive looked like it was booming. When the queen's gone, it fades.
We had already started to talk about how we might order a third queen for the hive this season, and then we did an inspection of the honey boxes above the queen excluder.
Who would've imagined that the queen was above the queen excluder? As someone in our satsang put it later that afternoon, she is not playing by the rules! There a couple of ways it could've happened. Perhaps the new queen managed to get through the queen excluder. Or maybe the old queen did the same and when the new queen was placed in the hive, she was chased out.
My personal theory, and it's only a theory, is that in the absence of a queen, the bees had created their own queen upstairs above the queen excluder. And so, the queen we placed in the hive last week was chased out. We'll know for sure if it's the queen from the breeder if we ever catch sight of her and see that she has a white dot on her back, a mark from the breeder that is placed on a queen to help with visibility.
At this point, we are trying to figure out what to do next. In the meantime, we have removed the queen excluder. The purpose of a queen excluder is to keep her from laying eggs in the upper part of the hive. This is so the bees use those frames for honey only. Once honey is mixed in cells with brood, it is not used for human consumption.
We now have three hives at the Amma Canada Centre in Halton Hills, as we split one of them earlier this summer.
In one of our three hives, we thought there may have been a naturally generated queen, but it turned out there was not. In the other, the queen died. So today we put a new queen in each of the two hives.
In this video, Markjan and I talk about the procedure while out at the hives and place one of the queens in what is hopefully her new home. There is a chance the bees will reject her.
The other queen was placed in her hive in the same manner. Let's hope for the best! We will check on them next week.
