The queen, the mother of all the inhabitants of the hive, is a truly wondrous creature, held in high regard not just by the bees but also by the beekeeper, for it is she who represents the future of the colony, the hope of honey, the prospect of immortality.
Having been fed the supreme food – royal jelly – from the first moulting until the day her cell is sealed, she will grow, if all goes well, into that beautiful insect on whom the future of fifty thousand rests. A good queen impresses by her large size, her shiny appearance, and the continued presence of her devoted entourage, her ladies-in-waiting who will often form an almost perfect circle around her as she strides across the comb.
New beekeepers, and even older ones, need not despair if they cannot see the queen. She is shy, dislikes the light, and usually refuses to be simply “seen”. With practice and good will it will be found that one may “sense” her and then see her, and this is invariably accompanied by a feeling of joy and excitement. Try it for yourself and you will desist from carrying out the much advocated practice of catching the queen and marking her with tippex or special queen-marking paint offered by the beekeeping industry for the purpose of making her more easily detectable.
Queen bees have a life expectancy of up to five years. In modern beekeeping very few make it to that age, as they are mostly culled and substituted with young queens after two years at the most. At the root of such behaviour lies the notion that the beekeeper knows best what the colony, the honey production unit, wants and needs. A fallacy indeed. The colony’s wisdom will ensure in the normal course of events that a queen who is too old or for some reason no longer capable of holding the colony together, is superseded. When this happens, the colony raises a new queen and quietly disposes of the old one, usually unnoticed by the beekeeper.
It is in any case rare for a queen to stay in residence for her entire lifespan, because of the bees’ natural form of reproduction known as swarming. When a colony prepares to swarm, it has reached a stage in its development where a division of one into two is possible. In a swarm, a wonderful and awe-inspiring sight to behold, the old queen and up to half of the colony’s inhabitants leave their home together and go in search of new quarters, leaving their old home well-provisioned and ready for the emergence of a new virgin queen who at the point of swarming will still be developing inside her cell.
If all is well in the colony, and as long as there has not been excessive interference with the natural processes within the hive, a colony will swarm at least once every year. However, ever since man discovered how bees go about producing new virgin queens in their hives, human inventiveness and the desire to control the manifold processes within the hive have known no bounds: mostly, we believe, to the detriment of the long-term health of the bees. Queen bees have been raised and mated under controlled conditions for nearly one hundred years now. Queens are dispatched in their millions across the world, and enormous scientific endeavour is directed at devising ever new ways of breeding the perfect bee. During the same period, and dramatically so in more recent times, bee health worldwide has plummeted so low that there are many voices now questioning the survival of the species.
As natural beekeepers, we are keen to learn from the bees and to find ways of caring for them which keep them strong and healthy. Swarming appears to be a major contributor to this, and may even contribute towards helping the colony cope with varroa mite infestation insofar as swarming interrupts the breeding of the varroa. Besides, there are many indications that the “best” queens result from the swarming impulse. In the words of the late beekeeper monk Brother Adam, a colony which “prepares to swarm has reached an optimum in its organic development, as well as opulence in every direction. Indeed, swarming is the natural manifestation of a colony having reached the summit of affluence. In such circumstances ideal conditions prevail for raising the best of queens from the physical point of view”. Unfortunately for the bees, Brother Adam then went on to initiating and “perfecting”, to worldwide acclaim, a relentless bee breeding programme in pursuit of the perfect bee, which has resulted in the virtual extinction of a whole variety of native strains of bee.
Rudolf Steiner gave his so-called “Bee Lectures” in 1923, a few years after the discovery of the reproductive processes within the hive. In these he warned against the long-term consequences of artificial queen rearing: “… we will see that what proves to be an extraordinarily favourable measure upon which something is based today may appear to be good, but that a century from now all breeding of bees would cease if only artificially produced bees were used. We want to be able to see how that which is so wonderfully favourable can change in such a way that it can, in time, gradually destroy whatever was positive in this procedure. And we want to see how, specifically, beekeeping can become of great interest in getting to know all the secrets of nature, particularly how something on the one hand proves to be very fruitful, but on the other hand simply leads to death and destruction. And so it is that beekeepers can indeed be very happy with all the progress that beekeeping has recently experienced in such a short time, but this happiness will barely continue for one hundred years.”
We are a few years away from the one hundred years Rudolf Steiner referred to, and the general situation of the bee is indeed very far from engendering happiness. However, each and every one of us who cares about bees can make a difference to this bleak prospect by letting the bees express their natural instincts. This includes allowing them to swarm and dealing with the swarms in a responsible way.
