On Queen Bees, and Their Names

Not every beekeeper names their queen bees.  Some beekeepers have over 300 hives, and at that scale it just wouldn't be feasible (and farmers don't tend to name each of their stock, anyway).

But when you do very small-scale beekeeping, as I do, I think it's nice to be able to identify which queen is doing what, in which hive.  In any case, different colonies exhibit different behaviour, a lot of which is genetically determined, and much of which is determined by the queen - either directly, via the genes that she bequeaths to her worker bees, or indirectly via her pheromones.  So it really is the case that different colonies - and by implication different queens - have different personalities.

I'm not the only beekeeper to name their queens, either.  Two beekeepers I met at Ealing & District Beekeepers - Emily (http://adventuresinbeeland.com) and Emma (http://missapismellifera.com) name theirs after essential oils (Emma is an aromatherapist).  You should check out their blogs by following the links - they really are good.

So, I decided I needed a consistent naming scheme for my bees.  Being something of a nerd (or am I really a geek?) I decided to name my queens after scientists and engineers.  Of course, because queen bees are female, it would be absurd to give them names like Charles (Darwin) or Albert (Einstein).  So, they are of course named after female scientists and engineers.  This has a curious effect - firstly, you start to realise just how many female scientists and engineers there are - and secondly, just how poorly known their names are, given the contributions they have made to human knowledge.

Take for example my first queen - Rosalind.  She was named after Rosalind Franklin, who was a leader in the field of X-ray crystallography, which is a technique for determining the structure of molecules by photographing them using X-rays.  Rosalind's work was crucial in determining the double-helix structure of DNA, for which Watson and Crick, and Rosalind's colleague Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.  Rosalind died in 1958, and sadly was not awarded the Nobel, as it is never awarded posthumously.  This is the most famous picture, photograph 51, which Raymond Gosling (her PhD student) took in May 1952 - it's a photo of an actual strand of DNA:

Regular readers will already know about Miriam, who has produced an excellent honey crop this year.  My two new queens are called Caroline (named after Caroline Herschel), and Sarah (after Sarah Guppy).  In the next two posts, I'll be saying a bit more about them - stay tuned...!