Honeybees Rally to Save Their Community. Can we do the same?

Setting the Stage

I’ve always kept stewardship at the forefront of my beekeeping practice. My goal is to be a good

steward of the bees…to put their needs above my own, which sometimes means, I can’t go to the

movies with friends because I need to inspect the hives or prepare my tools, etc…that kind of

thing.

For the 6 years that I’ve been a hobbyist beekeeper, I’ve tried to learn as much as possible from

beekeeper buddies, (much more) experienced beekeepers, books, meetings, conferences and the

like. I study like a crazy person and achieved apprentice certification from the Virginia State

Beekeepers Association.

This year was THE YEAR to settle into the art & science of beekeeping and learn more about

how the climate and stages of nectar flow impacted the bees. I was going to be ahead of the game

- more anticipatory than reactive.

Except the bees and life had other plans!

Friends, we are in the honey flow and thus far, I found myself running around being reactive

(fixing issues) for a good portion of my time with the bees. Totally #teamdoingtoomuch and

much less #beekeepingismeditative

For those of you who know me know that I do a lot of things - more than most people, actually-if

I do say so myself. Recently however, too much was TOO much. My life got extra busy with

doctors’ appointments for my dad, workshops, and classes. Thus, I was not able to attend to the

bees like I should have been.

In a little bit of desperation, I asked my beekeeping intern, Taylor to check the hives in one of

my bee yards. With her young and fresh eyes, she discovered laying workers in one of the

colonies in the apiary at the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm.

The truth is, I saw something off with that colony during my last inspection. I even wrote it in

my notes! But alas, I think I was moving too fast or I was too distracted or too novice, to really

put it all together and realize that something was amiss. I thought— “hmmm. That’s interesting.

I’ll just count the days and wait for the queen to return to the colony.” I was waiting like a

patient beekeeper. Waiting and waiting.

On the appointed day, Taylor cracked open one of the hives and noticed what is often the demise

of a colony. The workers were busy laying eggs and that, my friends is not what you want to see

in a colony.

(pause for some science here)

Bee in the Know

The Queen’s primary job is to lay eggs and to keep the pheromones of the colony’s inhabitants in

check. When the queen is absent for a prolonged period (either by her physical absence or

advanced age), her pheromones dissipate. Not only that, but some of her pheromones are also

chemical suppressants that keep workers’ ovaries from developing. Anddddd… the eggs that the

queen laid before she’s “no more”, develop and emerge and soon there will not be any viable

open brood (eggs, larvae, pupae) in the colony. This is the beginning of the demise of the colony.

You know what else has pheromones that suppress workers’ ovaries?

Right! Open brood. But not just any brood. Open worker brood. Yep, the girls.

In fact, open worker brood (eggs and young larvae) is the primary chemical suppressant to keep

workers (for the most part) from laying eggs.

The other kicker is that since the laying workers produce a queen-like pheromone, they all think

they have a queen in the colony and thus will dispatch (kill) any queen that’s introduced to the

colony by a friendly neighborhood beekeeper.

I know right?! Sooooo interesting.

The other thing you need to know is that queens can lay fertilized (diploid) eggs

(workers/female) and unfertilized (haploid) eggs (drones/males) – more about that in another

article. Workers can only lay haploid eggs, which apart from keeping the morale up in the

colony and mating with queens, they don’t really do too much—ergo, not absolutely necessary at

this stage in the honey flow where workers are needed to do all of the many jobs for the hive.

So, here we are at the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm with two 10-frame boxes stacked one atop

the other- both jam-packed with bees. The laying workers are in full swing. If it wasn’t so tragic,

one could more easily appreciate the “ride or die”, save the colony mentality that they have.

These workers are fervently trying to save the genetics of colony at all costs. The drones that

emerge from the cells will mate with a queen from another colony and carry on the family

genetics. Thus, the family line lives on even though the original colony dies. This is beautiful,

yet tragic.

What to do?

It’s a long, hard, committed road to try to save a colony with laying workers only to know that at

the end of the aforementioned long, hard, committed road, the colony may die anyway.

How many things have you committed to knowing full well that it may not work? I think many

people don’t try things that they are not reasonably sure they will succeed. Just my two cents.

I was one of them in this situation. One of the ways to attempt to save a laying worker colony is

to add a frame of eggs and young larvae from another colony every week for three weeks. You,

in effect, weaken the colony where you took the viable frame to try to save the colony in peril.

It’s true that a queen in a strong hive can lay 1500 eggs per day- so the eggs can be replenished

rather easily. However, for me, the real commitment was to do this every week for 3 weeks

without fail. 1) watch the weather like a hawk to decide the best time to get into a hive within the

allotted window of time, 2) open a strong colony and hope to find what you need, 3) put the

frame that you can use in a transport box and take it to the struggling colony, 4) replace a frame

from the struggling colony with the frame from the strong colony, 5) put laying worker frame in

the freezer for later use. All of this takes quite some time and I would have to do this regardless

of what comes up for me in my life.

So, given all of this, my first instinct was to dump out the bees… so many bees, but C’est la Vie.

I was going to dump them out (not sure where) and start completely over. I was all set. Then, I

slept on it and the next morning I decided that this could be my one big experiment for the

season.

With advice from a couple of beekeeping mentors, I decided to try to save the colony.

Tyrone Cherry and I rallied to undertake this endeavor together and he named the colony, Dora

Milaje, after the fictionalized all-women military group in the Marvel Comics series and Black

Panther movie. The Dora Milaje is based on the true story of 17 th century Dahomey Amazon

warriors of Benin, Africa who fought for their survival like nobody’s business.

I have to say that after naming the colony Dora Milaje, I was pumped to try this experiment until

I had was standing in my apiary with a beautiful frame covered with eggs and larva to put in

Dora Milaje. For a second there, I didn’t want to do it. Oddly enough though, I thought about

South Africa all those years ago Black South Africans were fighting for their survival and the

White South Africans did not want to concede any type of power and live together peacefully.

I thought about the student protests that are happening at colleges and universities across the

country, the Palestine, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Rwanda…and all the

places where the communities are fighting just for the right to live.

The Lesson: Bigger Than Bees

These thoughts made me sad and I knew that this was about bees but it was bigger than bees.

There’s no use having a strong colony if another colony dies and the strong colony could have

tried to save it.

The students in my middle school literature studies class are reading 90 Miles to Havana. We are

discussing communism, socialism, democracy, and all these discussions came to bear when I

gingerly picked up the frame of brood and put it in the box to transport.

This is my third week transporting frames and I am fully aware that my efforts may not help. But

I can say that I tried. I tried to be a good steward of the bees. A good steward for my students. A

good steward for the community.

What if we all took a little of our strength and shared it with someone or something that needs it?

What would the world be like if with did that?