Man hunt

So, where were we?

Oh, yes; earlier this week we noticed an unknown boy turn up to the nest. How did we figure that?

Well, for starters, I'm counting and tracking every single bee in and out of the nest at the moment, so I recognise any that are "foreign" and also any that do not have a corresponding initial trip out of our nest. Ultimately, all the bees from our nest must have been born inside it and so must have been through a "first flight" memorisation procedure on the first time they leave. So, that leaves me with a pretty good idea of which bees are ours.

Then, out of the blue, this different looking bee turns up, not having come from inside our nest. Something was going on. Also, he was larger than any of ours and had a distintive white fluffy tail (less pointed than a girl's). Finally, behaviour gave it away. He was clearly a visitor, flying round and checking the outside of our lodge rather than going straight in. He then also spent a lot of time working along the edge of the lid/base, getting a scent and - I suspect - leaving one. None of our girls have ever shown this behaviour. 

[video to come]

We were surprised to see a boy; given their lifespan, he must have been under 2 weeks old, which puts him having been born mid-September at the earliest. For a "first colony" nest (i.e. from a queen born last year), that would probably be quite late. So, perhaps we were seeing a boy from a "second colony" such as ours (but, as far as we can tell, not from ours). 

However, that would also be a bit puzzling, because it would imply the colony had laid workers, boys (and presumably queens) in fairly rapid succession. As it happens, we're trying to piece together the behaviour of "second colonies" to figure our how their lifecycle (which starts sometime around August) compares with their host colony (which starts around April). In particular, does a "second colony" queen go on to hibernate and start another new colony next year, or does she die after laying? (As ours has done; although she seemed to be fattening up to hibernate). Also, if the queen lays workers (females) during this season, is she still able to lay fertilised eggs next year, or is she left only able to lay unfertilised eggs? These turn into boys, who do not work for the colony, and so the colony would not survive. 

So, the existence of this boy adds another piece to the jigsaw. If he's come from a second colony, then it implies that both girls and boys are laid. It also adds credibilty to the suspicion we had that some boys were being laid in our second colony, because at want point we were seeing quite a large attrition rate from the nest: bees leaving and not coming back.

This in itself adds an intriguing twist to the story of "second colonies". Take ours, for example; it started to emerge towards the end of August after the original colony collapsed (partly due to heat damage in the nest). This means its lifespan is compressed into a time period of 5 weeks or so, very much shorter than the 10 - 12 weeks or longer of the original colony. So, we're intrigued to understand how well such a colony can perform and whether the Queen specifically compresses its lifespan into this time period by laying girls and boys in quick succession (and even Queens?) The evidence we're seeing is that she does lay both boys and girls - so the question is, what triggers the laying of the boys?: it would seem more likely that it must be due to seasonal/environmental conditions rather than how long she has been laying for. 

Lady Luck Turns

Our boy came and went and while we were intrigued, we thought no more of it, other than to keep an eye on him over the coming days.  

As is becoming the norm, the next day our collective jaws dropped when a massive bumble turned up at the nest entrance: lo and behold, it was very clearly a queen. She must surely have only been here for one thing - boys! 

Visiting Queen trying to figure out a way into the nest entrance

It's possible, of course, she was looking for a hibernation spot, so we had to reserve judgement. But not only had she turned up just a day after the boy, but there she was, exploring the outside of the lodge in all the same places he had, picking up his scent. It was all a bit uncanny.  Also, she'd shown no interest in the hibernation spots we've specially set up. These are much more disguised than the lodge as much more natural surroundings and also facing the preferred direction (North). 

She visited again later that day and again showed interest in where the boy had been and tried to get into the lodge - but was thwarted by the plastic flap at the entrance. There was no real excuse for that to be so - all the other queens we had in the nest previously managed to navigate it very well. But they had the benefit of starting on the inside and being able to push their way out and thus confirm for themselves how the flap worked and that it indeed is the entrance. 

It's a little different starting on the outside, as the flap has to be lifted, not pushed, so it's not necessarily immediately obvious it is the way into the test. And, to be honest, this is part of its design, because it's intended to keep foreign interest away from the inside of the nest. 

Boy & Queen meet at the nest together - but she still can't figure out how to get in

We had no idea whether this was a "one-off" visit, though she turned up twice during the day (and the boy turned up 5 times!). We presumed that if she was looking for a hibernation spot, having been thwarted by the entrance flap, she wouldn't turn up again. However, on the offchance we wedged the flap open a bit. This would allow her access to the entrance, and even if she didn't want to go right into he nest, she'd be able to drink some honey water that we provide just inside.

She turned up again the next day, in fact made twice as many visits, and did indeed explore inside the nest. Our boy, who we think stayed inside the nest overnight never quite co-incided with her, but we couldn't help but get the feeling that the two were trying to track each other down.

Over the course of the week our Queen and Boy have kept coming back to the nest (stats below). They've both been inside and he has stayed in there overnight a few times (from what we can tell). On the whole they have kept missing each other, though there have been a few occasions where they were in the nest together; but not for long and not such that we saw them actually hook up. 

Here's a graph of the activity over the last few weeks:

Grey: Return Nest Trips | Green: Newborn "memorisation" flights | Blue: Boy visits | Pink: Queen visits

We can see that there was a huge surge in Queen visits on 7th October. We were slightly baffled by this until we realised that there were TWO  queens now visiting the nest (and two boys as it happens). At one point we caught them both in shot together - it was all quite amazing.

TWO queens arrive at the nest

We continue to allow them to go into the nest and benefit from the honey water and they seem quite happy to spend stretches of about 20 minutes at a time in there. The Queens never stay overnight in the nest though, they always leave (often close to sundown) off to where they came from. (Would love to know where that is). 

This repeated visiting to the nest does not seem to make sense as hibernation activity - one or two checks on the location would confirm whether it is satisfactory or not, so we conclude that this is indeed mating behaviour. Unfortunately neither of the Queens or boys really seem to have managed to co-incide with each other yet, but we remain hopeful.  

My big worry is that they leave it a bit too late to go and hibernate, as the weather has suddenly returned to its more usual seasonal level - but we have to trust in their own body clocks to do the right thing. I also hope they don't end up trying to use our nestbox to hibernate, as it will not really be suitable. The old nest in there will not be hygenic for them; but from what we can tell, it wouldn't be normal for them to choose a nest site for hibernation, nor indeed for next year's nest. 

I do also have to wonder when these Queens were born, given they are now looking for males. The first "batch" of males was around August time, so we are two months down the line. That suggests they are also from a "second colony"- but certainly not ours. Our first colony produced half-a-dozen queens; there's part of me wonders if they are from that brood. There's no real way to find out, but it does seem surprising that they wouldn't have found a mate already over the last 8 weeks, so the behaviour remains a bit of mystery; or perhaps just a quirk of timing due to the abnormally warm weather conditions. 

Either way, it's a privilege to have them visiting and yet another source of fascination.

[Video to follow]

Handling Royalty

It's been a  busy fortnight tending to our new Beepol bumblebee hive. The weather was pretty inclement for our new bees to begin with, so it was a slow start for them.

In a way that was quite useful as it gave us chance to set up their lodge properly and get all the CCTV relocated and working (which meant, for example, tweaks to motion detection).

There was not (and has not been) a huge amount of activity from the nest over its first week and I wasn't really sure whether this should be a concern or not; the hive was supposed to have about 30 - 40 workers but I wasn't sure if being towards the back end of the "season" whether this number could be lower (it obviously was). In fact, by the time I got down to analysing our CCTV footage it looked like about 6 - 10 active workers; more on that later.  

We've actually made quite a number of interventions over the week so I'm going to highlight them in here and leave going into them in detail in due course. I've also been in contact with the expert at dragonfli (who supply the Beepol box) who's been answering some questions and providing some helpful information, so in due course I will fill in with some of his relevant information. 

Here are the things we've had to do over the last two weeks:

• bury a new queen - possibly the first queen out of the box - she was unable to fly
• cut the lid off the beepol box to allow room for the nest inside to get taller
• begin tracking detailed activity of workers and queens in/out of the nest (with a view to assessing its decline and queen emergence) 
• adding foam (steps) into the nest and honey (to help build reserves due to lack of workers) 
• later we had to fix the foam as the bees (quite incredibly) moved it
• resuce a tired, cold and wet worker and put her back in the nest
• deal with a wasp "invasion" - robbing the nest of honey
• produce the video from the CCTV that captured a Redtail male mating with one of our new queens
• trying various "trap door" designs on the front of the lodge to replace the "brushes" system
• complete the CCTV with the max number of cameras as we prepare for hibernation season

 All of these have had their own little saga, and time has got the better of me, so I'll deal with them in a few separate blogs.

New Queens

We were establishing the nest and lodge over the weekend of 1st August, which meant making some tweaks while the bee nestbox was already inside. Gulp! One of the adjustments was to the brush system which was slightly out of optimal position. The other was to remove the "flightpath" camera as it was not proving any value on the current lodge location and to relocate it to the wall of the house (looking side on) as well as fit the "entrance camera". The entrance camera provides the motion detection at the nest entrance (see below)

entrance camera mounted on lodge

It was after I had completed this work, with the utmost of care, that a bedraggled-looking Queen slowly emerged from the nest. 

Queen emerging

I cannot begin to tell you how my heart sank when I saw this. Not knowing any better my first instinct was that our queen had come out of the nest - perhaps to check on what the rattling and vibrations were. She looked bedraggled and tired - so it was a natural conclusion. We hoped she was just checking the nest integrity and would return inside, but she didn't. She dragged herself over the roof several times whilst we willed her to return. Then she fell off the edge of the roof and landed below the lodge against the greased bricks.

This wasn't ideal, but at least she was safe, so we sat and watched her, hoping for an opportunity to rescue her and get her back in the box without the risk of getting more grease on her. But it was not to be, she stayed there for about 3 hours getting progressively weaker. We came to the conclusion that whether or not she was our original queen or a new one, she had come out of the nest to die. Eventually by moving the bricks, we were able to scoop her up and place her in one of our other nestboxes where we could monitor her on camera. 

We did so over the course of the evening by which time she crawled and tucked herself into the inner entrance tube (this is designed to trick nest-search queens in spring that the nest is further underground than it really is). She stayed there and overnight passed away.

Our first emerging beepol Queen - who sadly never went further than our back up nestboxOnce we had retrieved her I took some macro photographs. It was clear from our close up analysis that one of her wings was damaged (creased) so we wondered whether she would have been able to fly at all. She seemed very weak when she came out of the nest - maybe she had been stuck in there without really being able to feed. We don't really know.

A Royal Entourage

Although it was sad to see her go, by the next morning our spirits were well and truly raised the next day by the emergence of another two queens.  We could tell they were new by their circling/memorisation procedure as they left the nest. And oh my! They were big! We've become accustomed to seeing tiny workers all season, so seeing a queen twice the size is quite startling at first! 

I started tracking activity over the course of the week and what became obvious was that more queens were emerging while the number of workers were declining. Reviewing CCTV showed 2 new queens emerging on the first day and then 3 on the second day. This was amazing! 

We were thrilled that our nest was fulfilling its destiny: producing queens to go off and mate, hibernate and begin next year's new colonies. It was really quite a touching moment to realise the "circle of life" had not suffered the devastating interruption that befell our Natupol colony. At last we could feel that keeping the bees had not just been a pointless exercise but at last we were contributing to, hopefully, their growth in numbers. 

We've counted a few more new queens over the 2 weeks we've had the box, but it seems as though lodging in the nest are about 4 or 5. It's hard to tell as their may have been some large workers, certainly to begin with, but their numbers have declined to, perhaps, 1 remaining. 

So, there has been a whole new process of study and learning with our new queens to understand this particular part of the bumblebee lifecycle. One of the most surprising things we have learnt is that we have multiple Queens inhabiting and co-existing in an otherwise-dormant nest. We presume that the "Mother" Queen is now dead (indeed, she may have been the one that came out and we tried to rescue). We also saw one very faded looking bumble in the box, which may have been our tired and overworked matriarch and who is no longer visible. 

So, here we have four or five queen bumblebees, treating our lodge as, well pretty much a travelodge: a place of security, warmth and safety to spend the night and rainy days, while otherwise going out foraging and looking for a mate.

This is all new territory for us, so we don't know what to expect of their behaviour. With that in mind, and with a view to trying to keep them resident as long as possible (partly to buy me time to build some "hibernation spaces"), we have tried to make their stay as comfortable and stress-free as possible. This has meant:

• trying to ensure that wax moth is kept out of the hive
• trying to ensure wasps are kept from robbing their nest honey reserves
• minimal disruption to the nest; we look inside at most once a day, under red light (invisible) at most for 30 seconds - since the nest is not being maintained by workers we need a supervisory role to check for any problems, such as infestation
• providing additional honey reserves into the nest if their own stocks appear low (strictly speaking this is not recommended due to the possibility of introducing disease from another colony; however, our queens only need to take this honey if their own reserves run low - e.g. after several days when they can't forage. In which case, we take the view, better to give them a chance to survive than perish from lack of energy and nutrition.) 

If anything, we're now putting a lot more effort into "managing" the nest, because it is not being managed by the colony and is more-or-less an empty "shell" that could turn into somewhat of a "biohazard" if we let nature's forces simply take over immediately! We've already seen a few flies, for example, showing an interest and getting inside the nest. 

Something we never expected to see happening was Queens bringing pollen back to the nest but we are certain we have observed this - here's a composite from our CCTV that shows the comparison in size between a worker and a queen, both with pollen:

size comparison of worker & bumblebee - both returning with pollenYou can see the queens bring a huge amount of pollen back on their legs and we can see it appearing in the nest. We take a comparison picture each evening inside the nest and we can see where the pollen has been deposited and how much was collected during the day. 

There's more to life than eating and sleeping!

Of course, our Queens are not programmed merely to rest and forage all day, but now to find a mate. We know that one of them at least has managed to do so, although it was perhaps not as successful as she intended! Our CCTV recorded one of our Queens flying back to the nest with a male Redtail in tow! Not only that but she dragged him (perhaps reluctantly!) into the nest where he emerged 20 minutes later. He came back 3 more times to investigate too: on one occasion getting back into the nest, but otherewise thwarted by the brushes (what can you say, he's a boy, perhaps not as savvy as our girls). 

Here's a still of one of his return visits, quite clearly a redtail:

male redtail revisiting the nest after mating the previous dayHere's the video of the full sequence:

 We don't know whether she would have realised it was a Redtail, so we can only hope she would have gone out at a later date to find a successful (bufftailed) mate.