Been worrying about Queen Catch’s hive the last two weeks or so. My gut has been telling
me something was amiss. When I cracked the hive lid last week to check their food supply,
it seemed like bee numbers were down. Colony strength should be just starting to climb
perceptibly here on LI.

By noon today, as this year’s first pollen started pouring into the hives by the handful, I
knew definitively that Catch’s crew was in trouble. They were bringing in bellies’ full of water
but only the rare tidbit of pollen. Uh-oh.

Pollen is a bee’s protein source. Adult bees just need calories from carbs (nectar, honey,
sugar) to function, but baby bees need both protein and carbs to develop and grow. In other
words, a colony collects pollen to feed their babies. The fact that Catch’s crew appeared to
have little need or interest in pollen collection today suggested they had no babies to feed.
Not good.

As it’s still too early to be ripping apart a hive, I figured I’d just peer between Catch’s boxes,
still on their stack. If I could confirm brood (baby bees in-the-making), I’d just close it up and
be glad it was a false alarm.

But it wasn’t a false alarm. No brood! Okay, I got this… I got this….

So I pulled all the boxes apart and separated the box with bees from the boxes without.
Then I sorted through the populated box. No brood, no eggs thus no queen. Okay, I can fix
this. I’ve got “skills”….

I went through the box with the cluster one more time. Rearranged things a bit so they were
centered in the box and surrounded by plenty of honey. Then I cracked open Shotgun’s
house next door. I put a couple of sheets of newspaper on top of it and plunked the box full
of Catch’s lost daughters on top of that, then slapped a lid on the whole shebang. Finally, I
removed all of the unused boxes from Catch’s former house from their foundation and got
them out of the apiary.

Chaos. But what I am learning about beekeeping is that I cannot bring order to chaos in an
apiary, or inside a hive, or even on a frame of comb. The bees are the only ones who can
pull off that miracle. My job is just to make sure that they have the building blocks and the
luxury of time to bring a colony back to it’s state of perfect order.

Shotguns’s girls and Catch’s crew will slowly chew their way through the newspaper
separating their hive boxes. Their scents will mingle and Shotgun’s pheromones will snap
Catch’s daughters to attention. They will seamlessly merge with their adopted family and
begin working for the greater good of the entire colony.

Initially I was seriously bummed to have lost one of my hives. I found dear Catch’s little
body on the hive floor later. I know she passed at least 3 weeks ago based on the complete
lack of baby bees. However, as I dismantled the empty boxes of her hive, I was again
reminded of the yin and yang of beekeeping. So often a moment of failure is tied temporally
to some other moment of success.

Yes, I lost my queen but I didn’t actually lose the colony. They just got a new address! 18-
20K of Catch’s girls are alive and well. In a few days, they will be hard at work raising
Shotgun’s babies and preparing for spring honey production as part of Team Shotgun. Now
with a new, monster workforce, they are all poised to explode into spring.

And then there is all the empty brood comb and full honey comb I pulled off of Catch’s
foundation! Discovering I now had this treasure trove at my disposal…to use as I see
fit…really took the sting out of losing pretty little Catch. It is amazing how liberating it is to
have spare wax comb at your disposal. I can use it to quickly make new colonies or to
expand others. It’s difficult to explain to a non-beekeeper, but trust me, it’s marvelous!
RIP Catch. Thank you for all you have taught me… and particularly for what you taught me
today. –Stacey