Movin' and Shufflin'

Last I left you, I was in a quandary about what to do about my dead Texas queen. I was faced with two choices...re-queening or combining the Lone Star girls with my other established hive. Because it would take some time to secure a new queen - time that the existing bees could ill afford to lose - I decided on the combining hives route. An interesting little bit of bee trivia was my chief concern in prolonging their queenlessness.
Remember I mentioned how the queen has a small arsenal of pheromones that she gives off to perpetuate certain behaviors within the hive? Such as her "happy and contented" whiff? Well she gives off another chemical cocktail that has a pretty amazing effect on all of her daughters. You see, worker bees are equiped with reproductive apparatus of their own, but it is kept in check by this particular pheromone. Their egg producing organs remain undeveloped as long as there is a healthy queen in the hive. If the queen dies and this pheromone is absent, some workers can become functioning egg layers themselves. There is a small catch, however. Because they have never mated with a drone, they are incapable of laying fertilized eggs. Unfertilized eggs become drones - even when layed by the queen. (The queen will do this on purpose to create a requisite number of drones for the hive) The workers cannot lay eggs that will grow up to become worker bees or queens.
All these workers know is that they suddenly find themselves having this maternal instinct to begin depositing eggs in cells. The problem with this is a hive cannot survive on party boys alone - someone has to cover that food thing - and so the colony will soon die out. Not a good outcome. So of course, this was my concern if I let these girls go another week without a queen.
The preferred method for combining two hives is to lay a single sheet of newspaper on top of the hive box receiving the transplants after cutting several small slits in the paper. You then take the hive box containing the new permanent house guests and set it on top of the newspaper. Over the next several hours or days, the scent of all the bees will intermingle, slowly convincing them all that they are just one big happy family. They will chew away the newspaper, and voila! One big hive. And this is just what I did. As of this writing, it has been four days and all seems well, judging from the activity at the hive entrance.
My next issue was rectifying the "one hive" situation. I really did not want to go forward with just one Super Hive. Fortunately, Pat Haskell, my bee class instructor, told me that Dane Hannum, another instructor from the class had "nucs" to sell. For the uninitiated, a nuc is an itty-bitty hive made up of 4 or 5 frames, 3 or 4 pounds of bees and a queen. The frames, in Dane's case, were fully drawn out and loaded with capped brood and honey. The perfect start for a new hive. All I needed to do was install the frames from the nuc into my 10-frame hive body, and add the additional frames on which the bees could expand their holdings. After driving to Arlington to pick up the nuc, I got them tucked in with no trouble. I even did it in short pants and a short sleeved shirt. I've come a long way in suppressing that primordial fear I mentioned in an earlier posting. I've been fortunate in not seeing my bees in a bad mood to this point.
As an aside, I 've spent a lot of time in and around my hives in the last month, and since my experience of the first day, when the girls pointedly showed me their defensive capabilities, I have not had the misfortune of being stung since. Until today. Ironically, it happened not while I was ripping open their home or blasting smoke through every orifice in the hive. No, I was sitting about 10 feet away, in my lawn chair, watching the girls winging about on a beautiful day. Something I've done about a hundred times. Today, though, I lowered my arm down to my side and put the squeeze on a hapless wretch who was drawn to the peculiar pheromones of my armpit. ZAP! She got me. And so you see, boys and girls, one cannot become too cocky about this business. One must always think that one enters the bee's world at the bee's pleasure and one must be thankful that they are a very welcoming, or at least oblivious sort most of the time.

NEW FEATURE!!! Sting count, to date: 4