A Beekeeper's Journal: It's Time for A New Queen Bee

by Martine Gubernat
Such was the answer to our question about what to do with our drone-laying queen.

With that pronouncement by one of our revered veteran beekeepers at a recent branch meeting, the fate of Queen #3 was sealed. Other experienced beekeepers echoed the decree in similarly macabre phrases such as “give her the pinch,” or “her time is up,” the latter of which sounded like a pronouncement from the Godfather. I cannot deny that we cringed.

Their words echoed like a knell of church bells at a funeral. We had a hard time reconciling how we could “off the queen” when in fact we became beekeepers because of our desire to help the bees whose existence these days seems tenuous. What’s a caring beekeeper to do?

Our concern started weeks before when we noticed limited bee activity in one of our eight hives. When we first started keeping bees about nine years ago, our mentor offered us sage advice that having more than one hive was a good idea because several hives offer a point of comparison, an opportunity to see what other hives in our own bee yard are doing as a way of determining what was normal and what was not. (He failed to emphasize, however, that eight hives instead of two are also four times as much work and expense, but his intentions were good.)

When we opened up hive #3 and noticed all the bumpy, round domes that mark the drone comb, and did not notice a multitude of worker bees, we knew that the gender balance in the hive was all out of whack. The large, hungry drones had consumed most of the honey stores that our girls were working so hard to gather. Queen #3’s daughters didn’t seem to know how to raise her replacement; if we didn’t do something soon, our girls would starve and we’d lose the colony.

We were not blind to the seriousness of the situation but we were loath to commit regicide. Do we not consider ourselves the caretakers of our colonies? We named our apiary Bee Kind Honey Farm, after all. Giving her the pinch didn’t seem very kind at all. Would we have the heart to “rub out” Queen #3?

The answer is yes, but it was not easy. We weighed the life of the queen against the life of the colony as a whole and came to the sad conclusion that Queenie had to go. We purchased a replacement queen, located Queen #3 then gave her a royal send off to that giant beehive in the sky, and got the colony queen-right again. We told ourselves that it was Tough Love, which was ironically true. We have grown to love our bees and it was tough indeed to make that decision.

As we continue into the summer nectar flow and our new Queen #3 gets busy laying 2,000+ eggs a day, we find comfort knowing that we tried our best to save the colony and give them their best shot at building up the hive and ultimately surviving the winter.

To celebrate the new monarch in Hive #3, we toasted her long and prolific life with some iced sun tea, to which we added the light floral delight of Adagio’s Goldenrod to enhance the flavor with hints of floral notes. Long live the new queen!