Day 12: Sunsetting The Sentry and the Mall-Speedwalking Queen
A high-voltage afternoon in the yard leads to a heartbreaking downturn for one hive, a bizarre mall-speedwalking queen, and a high-stakes newspaper merger.
Amanda Collins
5/29/20262 min read
If you walked into our yard at four o’clock last Friday, you would have thought the bees were filming an action movie. The air around The Citadel and The Bastion was absolutely electric—bees going completely insane, boiling out of the entrances in a massive, beautiful cloud of peak spring energy.
Naturally, I used that high-voltage energy to dive into the rest of the yard. First up: The Chalet.
To say the vibe inside The Chalet was "weird" is an understatement. We cracked it open and immediately found the queen, but she wasn’t acting like a dignified monarch. Instead, she was frantically tearing across the comb like an old mall-speedwalker trying to beat the crowd to the food court. There was a glaring lack of worker larvae, and the frames were overwhelmingly dominated by a sea of drones. It was a textbook lackluster performance. I wasn't sure where to go with this situation yet, so I just closed them up to have a think.
Meanwhile, The Citadel and The Bastion were absolutely popping. I even caught a glorious glimpse of the queen in The Bastion doing her thing. Over at The Keep, things were looking equally promising; the colony was aggressively pulling down their pollen patty, and their calm, organized behavior practically screamed that a viable queen was in there, successfully expanding the empire.
Then, I got to The Sentry... and the mood shifted.
The downturn here was stark. The box was incredibly sparse, running on a dwindling, aging workforce. It became painfully clear that either their virgin queen had died in her cell, or she had failed to return from her hazardous mating flight.
I briefly considered Option A: stealing a frame of capped brood from a powerhouse hive to boost them. But looking at how few bees were left, the risk was too high. They didn't have the numbers to keep a new frame of brood warm, and forcing an aging, sparse population to nurse babies is a recipe for a total colony collapse.
That left two other choices:
Option B: Attempt a risky, late-stage merge.
Option C: Initiate a complete dissolution, shaking them out and re-distributing their gorgeous frames of pollen, nectar, and drawn comb to hives that could actually use them.
In a bid to give the mall-speedwalking queen at The Chalet a much-needed workforce boost, I pulled the trigger on Option B. I hauled The Sentry box over, popped it directly on top of The Chalet using the classic newspaper-and-sugar-syrup trick, and walked away praying that a shared sugar barrier would unite them into a single, functional family.
I wrapped up the afternoon checking on The Haven, only to find a horror show of hive beetles floating in the top feeder. I pulled it, dumped the beetles, and gave it a deep scrub. Finally, a glance at The Ranch sparked some serious anxiety. Its limited horizontal layout is filling up at an alarming rate, and they are rapidly running out of room. I had to close them up for the day, but a deep dive into the horizontal frontier of The Ranch is officially locked in for our next project...
The Moral of the Day: In the apiary, you can't force a broken colony to fix itself. Sometimes the smartest move isn't trying to save every fading soldier, but knowing when to combine your forces to build a stronger front line.