Beekeeping Life Of A Virgin Queen

right there she is that's her she's flying she keeps flying over that corner there she goes back inside what does she do when she goes inside nothing kind of walks back out I think maybe this is the way you get enough nerve to take a mating flight I need to go mate with drones tomorrow if the weather is good but I'm embarrassed I don't know if I should so what's the most frustrating thing and beekeeping what's the most frustrating thing for you is it not being able to keep your smoker going about the time you need it it won't work is that frustrating it is is that the most frustrating thing No how about getting stung now that's frustrating right indeed getting stung on the eyelid getting stung on the temple of your head getting stung on your lips getting stung up your nose those are terrible things those are so frustrating is that the most frustrating thing of beekeeping I don't think so what I do think is the most frustrating thing of beekeeping is keeping a queen in the hive laying really well so today what we're gonna look at we're gonna talk about and I'm gonna show you we're gonna follow the path of a queen of a five frame Nook where I remove the Queen and then we're gonna see how long it takes or even if we can get a lane Queen again we're gonna let them raise their own queen we're gonna see how long it takes if it works and if she'll get mated I've got some really cool things to show you we're gonna actually get a chance to see a Virgin Queen walking around we're gonna get to see a Virgin Queen flying we're gonna get to track and figure out the math on the days how long it takes to get a lane Queen after you remove a queen or she dies or something like that that's gonna be so fun but before we get started let me tell you about something I'm so excited about my new book sherry and I wrote this book every you need to know to start your first time backyard beekeeping look at this Wow I love it we worked really hard all through the winter last year to get this book published and get it out it's gonna go on as well it's on sale right now on pre-order on Amazon I'll provide a link down below where you can click on the link if you want to preorder this book it is really a thorough book especially for brand-new beginners and all it's got stuff on building hives I mean it's just really cool we're excited about it and it will become available in stores everywhere and the hard copy like this probably around July but right now you can go ahead and preorder it follow the link below now let's get started on my project of monitoring a queen over a 30 day period this is the hive that are the little nuke we're gonna open up as you can see here the date says queenless on May the 12th 2020 today is May the 30th it's been 18 days ago something went queenless so we should have a virgin queen walking around but I doubt if she's taking her mating flight yet let's open her up see what we look find in there what I do I get the Sun behind me and I'm actually just looking at this frame to see if I see eggs are a virgin queen and if I do I'm going to point out the behavior of a virgin queen you and it is a nice day today the Virgin Queen cells are are the queen cells are visible here in the picture so you can see where she has emerged now we just have to find every this is something that so many beekeepers will ask me they'll say I see Queen cells where she's gone the Queen cells are tore down but I don't see any eggs what's going on do I have a queen do I have a virgin queen is she laying so what I'm doing is studying the the bees really well again this is a tiny little hive a little five frame nook with only a few frames and it was beads on it I don't see any sign of any Queen on this frame on this side and again looking at this side these Virgin Queens will run around anywhere in this box also it's a good day for a Virgin Queen flight so we might even get to see her come back in with the mating sign attached the lower part of her abdomen of course so the only thing to do now is to come back a few days later okay so I waited two days to come back and check to see if a queen you know maybe a virgin queen was on a mating flight maybe I just have trouble seeing her and this is an example of some of the frustration that you can encounter when trying to reek wean a hive nineteen twenty days so we've been about 20 days from the time that they took the Queen out so it took about a day for them to know they needed a queen that was 19 days 16 days they raised the Queen and we looked a few days ago which was a bit early we didn't see anything so we're gonna look again today some people give up a little too quickly and so let's look again today to see if we can find a queen on here and it go really slow because I haven't smoked them and I don't want to be stung you can see evidence of where the Queen's were being raised in the cells that are now torn down here's a torn down Queen cell here there's one here that means that the Queen's came out and now they're just tearing them down so let's take a minute now and see if we can find it clean walking around I suspect that she would be a smaller looking virgin queen either not mated yet or not full of eggs where normally a queen that is well mated and producing eggs is larger in my opinion than a virgin queen tilt this up where I can get a better look at it and you have to be determined to spot these little virgin Queens and I just did see if you can find around here you know what I'm gonna mark her just so we know it's the same one let me get my marking pen it's hard for me to tell that she's on this side let's look at the other side there's not many beads over here oh but there she is they're walking around see that's why they are different than a mating queen they walk everywhere it's hard to find him you'll inspect a hive they'll be over on a honey frame you'll never see that little virgin queen but she's all this hive has for a future so she's important to us she went to the other side I'd prefer that there you go all right well she's parked over to the other side she's at the Bott see how virgin Queens walk all over the place they don't really state and she flew off I got eyes on her I'm watching her fly and she's flying near the entrance is she on the wall it'd be great if she was on the wall because then I could demonstrate how frequently Virgin Queens will just oh she is on the wall there she comes up to the top I don't want to move my camera just yet she's right there she flew again she was right there and flew I don't see what she does now let me take the camera back to the entrance she's hanging out by the entrance over in these pile of bees you're there she is right there you see her hang on there she is she's flying let's see if she lands there she is she's landed she's up again she's landed she's walking she walked in the corner all right well Hauser's crazy this is fun there she is again walking around she's flying she landed and went in again there she is flying she's still flying mm-hmm I'm having trouble keeping track of her you're gonna have to help me there she went ha ha oh my gosh oh we're not scared of losing her I'm not afraid that she's gonna fly away if she flew away now she would just mate with drones but it's the wrong time of the day because right now it's about 6:30 at night drones her back at 3 or 4 cuz so she's not gonna fly in mate now but isn't this interesting are we discovering that maybe these Virgin Queens do take these little orientation flight sessions around their their hives so they can know exactly where it is and they take their mighty mating flight and come back out there she has up here at the top right there she is that's her she's flying she keeps flying over that corner there she goes back inside what did she do when she goes inside nothing kind of walks back out I think maybe this is the way you get enough nerve to take a mating flight I need to go made with drones tomorrow if the weather is good but I'm embarrassed I don't know if I should maybe this is part of their ritual of beginning to take that mating flight where is she now help me people you're watching the video and to help me you see her anywhere let's go back here look around oh there she is again there she is here right there walking up the wall she flew back over there went back inside that side well I got a little baby bee on my finger over my hand look at that talk about your own young bees I got to do something to get her back over there cuz she's so young oh you know what she flies but you jump off my hand and just please walk here up a chillier air get on your own frame there you go whoo all right back to business there's a queen she is like systematically flying around this corner there she was here these other bees seemed to be flying with her like in some sort of a you know pattern they they go out with their and fly around the hive a little bit to know they're not gonna swarm because there's not enough piece of swarm and it's a virgin queen they're not going to swarm with a virgin queen this colony needs a queen and a whole bunch of bees just form they don't have that all right where's she at now so we think she's in the hive that's a drone it's a drone right there I don't want to go back in the hive and look for give it a second here as I see some activity of bees flying well there she is right there you're walking that's her urging clean walking down walk inside she walked back out you see her right there it's a Virgin Queen walking around I want a marker she's walking underneath there she's on a frame she's in the back side of this frame I'm just gonna pretend that I can pull this off I'm gonna use the frame prop that I invented put it there I gotta be careful not to kill her there she is I'm safe I'll set it right here all right if I miss my first attempt to catch her she'll fly away I'm trying to stop her from going this way anymore get off me workers okay I got her Wow so now I have my sorry that was out of camera I was just like freaking out but anyway now there's my Virgin Queen don't think she's mated I'm gonna try to I'm gonna try to but you go away I'm gonna try to mark her so that we'll know all right so I got her back two legs just test this blue out okay looks good okay let's just put a little blue on her we're gonna let that dry all right let's try to get this worker be off she just the worker bee just wants to take care of the Queen pick her up by our wings again all right get off all right now I'm just gonna set her back down okay let her walk around up she's flying all right and I see her she's coming back to the entrance she's right there on a blade of grass with a blue dot on her come on Virgin Queen ah are you doing out there lady I don't want to try to put her in the hive because I don't care - I want to see what she does on her own right our own little scientific experiment she's flying she's up pretty high let's watch the entrance there she is back to her old tricks she went in the hive along with that be behind her all right I'm gonna put this frame back in now is got a blue dot to look for - all right let's just for fun while we're together let's just gredin look around for her right i dripped a little nectar out of the frame that i set up on my frame prop that's fine be careful not to smash her there she is right there see this honeycomb yep walking around let's see if we can just get her back in there and that's good enough for me let's put a stop on it she is she knows where she's at she knows how to get in out of her hive okay so we're done looking and just some information here I removed the Queen that was laying really well on five twelve I assume they probably started a new queen the next day on the 13th take sixteen days to raise the Queen until she emerges that puts her coming out of her cell on five twenty nine we did look a little bit on in 529 for her selves were open we saw nothing we came back today on the 1st of June and we spotted the Virgin Queen and we marked her crazy windy he calls on the tropical storm that came ashore on a few days ago and so totally shut down the bee operation on being out there and do anything with hives no bees were flying yesterday was just unbelievable here in Illinois with very strong extremely strong winds and rain but right now we need to get back in the little nuke box and see what's happening to the bloom Queen that I marked hurricane Queen see how she's doing if she's laying yet well it's on the other side of this building and right now I'm standing against this building trying to not be blown away right so what we're going to do I'm gonna go out there in the wind coming out of the south I'm gonna literally pick up because the Beat's really aren't flying I'm gonna pick that box up I'm gonna bring it right here and where it's not so windy I've got a little limp um and since they're not flying because it's so windy it's a little cooler today I don't think it's gonna make any different I'm not planning on using any smoke a small hive okay Wow not a lot of piece of it is the Queen in there let's see take out the biggest frame here I gotta use hive tool rope Alyssa's got it stuck slow without smoke all right very good see if she's on this frame I cannot see the name not see the Queen by the evidence of the Queen goes down in the selves I can see larvae so right through here indeed very good let's keep looking for the Queen maybe on the other side Oh on the other side there she is that it uh that's our blue queen that we marked you around so that's the queen that we watched fly around walk around take a leading flight now she's back while we do in this train there is larvae that's older than five days I'm trying to hold it one hand look at this Barbie right here so here we go they're capping this over right here and the capital Vermont a state so we almost have to conclude that make sure our queen is still there we didn't drop her in the grass there she is so let's put her back and let's do the math let's go with the number seven I think that's gonna be the right number we're good we're meeting the rain this is cool so we have larvae that's about seven days old we're gonna see seven do the math we're gonna say 21 days so what this means is if I'm doing the math right it took 21 days from here when they started raising a queen until she started laying eggs we can do another mathematical equation that if we assume that she emerged on the 29th then we would say we could figure out how many days until it took her to to mate after she was born let's say she was born on the 21st there are 31 days in May so let's say two and then we take it all the way to the ninth so from the time she was born she started laying would be 11 days days I'm gonna write that down over here and we have another equation we can do this we can say that we spotted her and she did not appear to be acting like a mated Queen on June the 1st that she had not taken her mating flight I'm gonna say she took her mating flight on the because the weather was good the next day and now we're at nine so it seems like gosh she started laying so quickly you know she if she made it on the second and some of this larvae is seven days old then Wow she had to have started laying on the second said bring that larva to this age today well we got done before the rains came in and forced me to be inside to wrap it up but I hope that was educational and entertaining for you to see and follow that Queen for about thirty days about a month and see how long it takes now you know the math you can refer to this video and you can kind of use the same math I did to see when you can expect your queen to be mated or expect to see eggs and then if you're past these kind of dates you don't see any eggs or brood oh you're in trouble you need to buy a queen hey don't forget to check out our book that sharing I wrote backyard beekeeping everything you need to know to start your first time this is very helpful even if you're up and running this is going to be helpful for you so click on the link below I've provided a link down in the description and you can pre-order this book on Amazon check it out I'll see you next time

Channel: David Burns

Views: 16,521

Rating: 4.9270515 out of 5

Keywords: beekeeping, queens, honey bees, how to start beekeeping

Id: StDYEt6Voik

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020