An Accident - Or Something More Sinister?

I checked the bees on Saturday, and everything in the nucleus (Ottoline's bees) was fine.  All good in June's hive (#2) as well.

Things in Katherine's hive also looked fine - at least, at first.  There were recently-laid eggs, as well as capped and un-capped brood.  A few frames in, and I found an open queen cell, which I removed.  On the next frame were four more.  I tackled the first three, removing the small larvae and cutting out the structure of the cells to discourage the bees from re-using them.

When I got to the 4th queen cell, I noticed something odd.  Instead of the end being completely open, there was a dark shape just poking through the entrance.  At first, I thought this would be a worker bee, depositing royal jelly in the cell for the larval queen to feed on.  But, oddly, it didn't seem to be moving.  Also, it didn't look like the end of a worker bee - it didn't seem stripy enough, and it was too pointy.  I carefully cut away at the sides of the queen cell, and was amazed to pull out this:

Yep - that's Queen Katherine - dead, after being stuck head-first in a queen cell.  This is a picture showing where it was located on the frame (you can clearly see it in the corner, towards the lower part of the photo):

And here's a closer look (you can even still see specks of green paint that have rubbed off from her thorax):

This is really remarkable - it's the first time I've found a dead queen inside a hive (though I have previously seen a dead queen outside, after she was dumped there by her workers).  And the really weird thing is, it seemed from the shape of the cell - the entrance of which seemed too narrow for her to squeeze into - that the workers were sealing her in, from the outside.  This is genuinely odd - I've never seen or heard of bees behaving like this before.

So, what had happened?  Well, there are two possibilities:

1. She'd for some reason crawled into the queen cell head-first, and got stuck
   
2. The workers chased her into the cell, and killed her

Looking at option [1], it's not by any means impossible.  But it is unlikely.  A queen will always enter a queen cell abdomen-first, as she has only one business being there - to lay an egg.  She has no reason to go in head-first if the cell is empty.  And if there is already a larva in there, with royal jelly, then there's no point going in head-first either (she can't feed the larva - that's strictly a worker bee job - and she can't eat the royal jelly, as she has to be fed mouth-to-mouth by the workers).  But maybe it was a freak accident?

Or maybe not.  After all, she had laid eggs within the last day or so (I know - I saw them).  So why was she dead?  She could, perhaps, have got stuck and died - but I'm not sure there would have been enough time for her to have starved to death.  Maybe, then, she had been stung to death by the workers, who for some reason had decided to replace her.  If you look at the photo of her (click on it to see it in higher-resolution) you'll notice her wings have been damaged.  Now, that might have happened when I was getting her out of the cell.  But I suspect they may have been bitten by the workers when they attacked her.

Like inside a beehive is pretty brutal - if the workers decide the queen is not meeting their high standards, then they will cheerfully kill her off and replace her with one of their sisters.  I've had this happen a couple of times before - it's just a part of beekeeping life that you get used to.  But never before have I found the queen's body still inside the hive.  I've been keeping bees for 10 years now, and yet every season they still manage to surprise me!

In case you're wondering how the bees will cope without a queen - don't worry.  Right now, they will be making new queen cells (from the eggs I saw), and I will have a look in the hive tomorrow to see how they are getting on with raising Katherine's replacement.

Introducing... Queen June!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #2 is called June. She is named after June Almeida, who was a Scottish virologist, and a pioneer in virus imaging, identification, and diagnosis.

June started her career working in histopathology at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and then moved to St Bartholomew's Hospital in London.  In 1954 she moved to the Ontario Cancer Institute, where she worked as an electron microscopy technician.  While in Ontario she was awarded Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) for electron micrographic research of antibodies.

In 1964 June joined the research team at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in London.  She worked on the hepatitis B virus and also cold viruses, as well as a new virus in humans that at the time was given the identifier B814.  June used electron microscopy to photograph organ cultures containing B814, and noticed that the structure of the virus particles was similar to two other viruses she had previously studied - infectious bronchitis of chickens, and mouse hepatitis liver inflammation.  Her previous papers on the chicken and mouse viruses had been rejected by reviewers, who believed that the viruses were actually known flu viruses.  However, with the evidence from B814, June now knew that she was looking at a new, and previously unidentified group of viruses.

June's photographs of the new viruses showed that they appeared to be surrounded by a distinctive 'halo' - caused by protein spikes on the surface of the virus.  The latin for 'halo' is 'corona', and so this family of viruses became known as 'coronaviruses'.

As well as her work on coronaviruses, June also continued to work on hepatitis B, and in the 1980s she was involved in producing micrographs of the HIV virus.  Later in her career she worked at the Wellcome Institue, and in retirement she maintained an advisory role at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School.

Here's a photo of her topical namesake, queen June:

 

Introducing... Queen Ottoline!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in the nucleus is called Ottoline. She is named after Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, who is a British plant biologist and Professor of Plant Development at the University of Cambridge, as well as being the director of the Sainsbury Laboratory.

Ottoline studied at the University of Cambridge for both her BA and PhD degrees, and then undertook post-doctoral research at Indiana University.  In 1994 she worked at the University of York, before moving to Cambridge in 2010.

Ottoline's research includes the genetics of plant development and the interaction of plant hormones with the environment.  Notable achievements include the identification of the auxin receptor, which is a hormone that controls shoot architecture and development in plants.  She also played a key role in promoting Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism in plant biology research.

Undertaking world-leading research has earned Ottoline a number of awards, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.  She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to plant science, science in society, and equality and diversity in science.  Other awards include the Rosalind Franklin Award (2007), the Genetic Society Medal (2016), and the EMBO Women in Science Award (2017).  She is a fellow of the Royal Society, an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and a Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

At the end of this month Ottoline will become Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation.  Fun fact: that's where I work!

In 2017 Ottoline was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific.  You can listen for free on the BBC Sounds app, or via this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08q5wxx

Finally - back to bees, and here's a picture of queen Ottoline: