A New Reign

The colony was acting weird today. I told Ilana to check them out and she came back to tell me that the queens were 'tooting'. This is not a euphemism for gassy bees, oh no. 'Tooting', also known as piping, is the noise the baby queens make either while still inside their cells or immediately after emergence. The queens make this noise by vibrating their wing muscles without moving the wings, which causes the sound to resonate in the thorax. It occurs most often where there is more than one queen in a hive and is thought to be a battle cry announcing the queen's willingness to fight. It may also demonstrate the fitness of the new queen to the worker bees, which may rally around the strongest virgin queen. You have to listen to the hive very carefully, and if you are lucky (which we were) you can hear a sound like a mosquito buzz (high pitched whine) coming from inside the hive, possibly followed by a response buzz from another queen in a different cell. The sound from our own hive was too faint to record for you, hence the You Tube link, but it sounded identical to this video. Specifically, this is the 'tooting' noise, which suggests that at least one queen has already hatched and, workers willing, is on the prowl.

If they haven't already done so, any day now the rest of the queens will emerge and it will be Thunderdome time, unless they are planning successive swarms. Good timing for it, the weather will be nice this week for the victorious queen's mating flight.