The Queens of March

By Eric Malcolm

A beekeeper’s year starts in the spring. Timing of spring management is critical to healthy productive colonies, and it is not a simple task. This is especially true for the Maryland beekeeper and her colonies. A typical overwintered Maryland colony has a large amount of stored pollen. When weather allows, this ready protein source permits colonies to start rearing brood, and about a month later, adult bee populations start to grow. Strong early spring colonies pose both opportunity and risk for beekeepers. By anticipating colony development, the best beekeepers can predict and prepare for the time-sensitive and critical beekeeping activity of splitting. At UMD, weekly inspections of our colonies (weather permitting) began early this year when winter was still with us. By the early days of springtime, we had started making stand-alone splits, as soon as we knew we needed to control swarming. As is typical, our overwintered colonies are not all the same size. We first tackled several overwintered colonies that were very strong, and we made queenless splits. Next, we made several more splits using purchased queens on other colonies that had just grown a bit in size. Still other colonies remained small and unsplittable. Those were left to requeen last in our sequence.

While in the yards near the end of March, we saw two distinct kinds of queen cells. When looking at Figure 1 and 2, can you guess which frame came from a walk-away split? And which from an overwintered colony?

Figure 1

Photo: Kensie Olson, March 28, 2024, Beltsville, MD

Figure 2

Photo: Kensie Olson, March 28, 2024, Beltsville, MD

Figure 1, showing an emerged queen cell (circled in purple), is typical of emergency replacement queen cells. These cells appear on the face of the comb, extending out from a worker comb cell.  This is from one of our walk-away splits, and it is a welcome sight, as it means the colony successfully reared a queen from a young larval worker bee. Typical of emergency queen-rearing activity, there are many queens cells on the frame; these, however, remained unhatched.

Figure 2 depicts typical swarm cells: many long, extended queen cells at the bottom of the frame. This frame came from an overwintered colony whose population had grown quickly. This frame made a great addition to a stand-alone split that had failed to make a queen.