First Inspection

The moment of truth that inaugurates the new beekeeping season - the first time we open the hives, look individually at each comb and discover if our management has enabled them to endure the winter and emerge in good heart. As usual, we have a mosaic of triumphs and disasters, which we must treat with Kipling's prescribed equanimity

Seven colonies entered the winter. One perished a while ago. Four are doing well, one is in need of some care-giving. The seventh is, I think, doomed, but at least gives me the chance to expound a little beekeeping esoterica. I'm pretty certain the colony now has a "drone-laying queen": she can only lay eggs that will produce drones, not workers. No workers means no survival, as every good socialist knows

First, sex. A newly emerged queen bee mates during the first week or two of her life - in mid-air, on a mating flight, with multiple drones, all of whom die as a consequence. The Internet has some amazing footage showing this happening. Careful what you search for! The queen retains the sperm that she acquires on this day or two of high drama for the rest of her life (typically 3 or 4 years) and uses it to fertiliser eggs as she lays them

Second, more sex. When a queen bee lays an egg, she can choose to fertilise it or not from her stock of sperm. If she does, it becomes a genetic female; if she does not, it becomes a male - a drone. This is a peculiarity of social insects: the males grow from unfertilised eggs and, as a consequence, only have a single set of chromosomes. We are used to the idea that each of us has 23 pairs of chromosomes in every cell, one of each pair from our mother and one from our father. Male bees have only one copy of each chromosome, all of them from their mother, the queen

Fertilised, female eggs generally grow into worker bees - only under very special circumstances is a fertilised egg allowed to grow into a queen. Although workers are all female, they do not mate and do not lay eggs. Their nutrition when they are young means they do not grow to the size of a queen, and the pheromones released by the queen ensure that the workers ovaries remain inactive. There is even a 'militia' within the hive who ensure that any workers who slip through the pheromone net and start laying eggs are apprehended and killed

So, back to our 'disaster' hive. When we inspected it we found only drone brood, no developing workers. The queen appears to have lost the ability to lay fertilised eggs, so there are no young workers, only the remnant from last year. It may be that the queen has run out of sperm - perhaps she was not well mated last year. It may be that disease has disabled her and prevented her applying sperm to her eggs. There is a very slight chance that she may 'fix' herself in the next couple of weeks, and we may rescue something from the situation, but I doubt it - it is very rare for a drone-laying queen to revert to normal laying

Any beekeepers reading this will ask if I am sure that it is the queen who is laying all these drone eggs. Is there a possibility that the queen has died and that, released from the constraints of the queen's pheromones, some of the workers have started producing eggs - obviously unfertilised, as they have never mated? Well yes, it is possible, and it's true we did not see the queen. But workers who lay eggs have short, worker's abdomens - they cannot reach the bottom of the cells to deposit eggs there, so they put them on the side of the cells. What's more, laying workers are incompetent, and tend to lay two or three eggs in every cell. The drone eggs we saw were perfectly positioned, singly, in the bottom of each cell, just as a queen would do it

Eggs are visible in this picture as small, white flecks at the base of each cell, especially left-of-centre near the bottom. These are not actually from the doomed colony, but eggs are eggs! The capped brood at the bottom right is reassuring worker brood

I'll add an extra that is from the apiary, but nothing to do with bees. Mrs M has been nurturing these for some years and is delighted to see them looking so vigorous.

Disasters and triumphs are recorded and will be electronically logged tomorrow. The season has begun