re: #416 Mad Al-Jaffee

Beekeepers takes hives to different farms/orchards - wherever they are needed to pollinate plants. I think some of them make more doing this than they do from selling honey.

We made the most money from selling queens at the apiary where I worked. January/February are “shaking season”…three lbs of bees and a queen put into a little box with wire mesh sides on it, then they’re put in the US mail and sent to apiaries in colder climates where the bees die off every winter. The outfit I worked for was a family affair…four different apiaries in the area, and each of us had about 2,000 colonies. We also harvested queens by taking young larvae, putting them in tiny wax cups, and hanging them upside down in hives with no queens (all larvae have the same characteristics for the first five days—workers (female), drones(male) and queens(female, duh). If the cell was inverted, the workers would draw it out into a queen cell (about the size of your pinky to the first knuckle 1.5 inches or so). After thirty days, we’d cut those from the bits of wood they were attached to, and go ‘plant’ them in small hives called ‘nukes’. A week later, there would be a ‘virgin’ queen, and a week after that, she’d fly (to get fertilized)…you’d see a cloud of hundreds of drones chasing a virgin around the yard…the lucky guy got killed for banging the little lady, and the rest of the drones would be killed by workers for failing to do so. Drones can’t feed themselves, just like queens, so the workers simply forced them to stay outside the colony and let them starve to death.

Such a lovely topic for the first week in spring…thanks to whoever brought this up.