Times are a changin'. Since my last post, I have confirmed that there was not buildout of what looked like queen cells (queen cups) into swarm cells. I've found several queen cups during hive inspections every other weekend but have not seen any larva in them. Usually when I see these built out cells designed to potentially support future queens, they are along the bottoms of frames and I've been removing them to buy myself some time. If I saw any with eggs or larvae in them, I would leave them alone. Today, however, I saw a few supersedure cells, as pictured below.
This large cell pictured is what a "queen cup" looks like, but because it occurs within the upper two-thirds of a frame, it is indicative of the colony overthrowing the existing queen and is not a swarm cell. Apparently the honey bees know something about their queen that I can't detect, since I saw the queen today and thought that she has been doing a fine job at laying. I took a short video of her:
Her laying pattern seemed pretty tight on frames that had laying room for her. Maybe her pheromones aren't as strong as they once were and she is no longer considered suitable to the girls. I hope that if they do decide to proceed that they will be smart about overthrowing her and wait until her successor has proven well-mated and is laying properly. I'm going to let them continue to build out the supersedure cells, if that's what they choose to do, and monitor the colony closely to make sure that they don't end up queenless. I will miss this queen though - she has good genes and produces a very gentle, motivated fleet.
All of the capped drone (male bee) comb that I removed from the edges of regular frames this weekend contained mites. Below is a closeup of what the developing drones versus the capped drone comb looks like on a drone trap frame. Drone cells protrude from the frame significantly in comparison to worker bee cells. Several weeks ago, I installed a drone trap frame for integrative pest management of the varroa mites and am really glad that I did.
This week the drone trap frame was fully capped on one side, so I removed it and fed it to the chickens. As I watched them snack, I noticed mites in with the drone pupae.
Honey bees require a very specific cell size of wax comb to raise worker bees. When comb is warped, damaged, or too large, they will more often use it to raise drones. Because varroa mites have relatively the same developmental timeframe as drones, mites typically sneak in right before the cells are capped to reproduce with the larvae of drones. The emergence of a drone from one cell can yield up to six mites, contributing to a disastrous mite load in the hive.
Drone trap frames are plastic, wax-coated frames that have the beginnings of larger cells for the bees to draw wax from and consequently raise only drones in. Putting this in a hive encourages all of the mites in the hive to crawl into the comb on this frame to reproduce, with the goal to remove it before the bees fully develop and emerge. It's a small sacrifice to help reduce the mite load in the hive. Alternatively or in conjunction, I could use an organic treatment, but I try to reserve that as a last resort.