At the beginning of August, the colony in hive #1 had got large enough that I felt able to do a split. So, with the help of budding bee buddies Helen and Joel, I moved queen Dorothy - and half of the bees - out of hive #1 and into #2. A week later, the bees in hive #1 had made a solitary queen cell, and ten days after that I saw the new queen.
But of course, she hadn't yet mated, and the weather in August was somewhat variable, so I didn't want to be too optimistic. However, a couple of weeks ago I saw the first eggs neatly laid in cells, and then last weekend I was able to find the new queen and mark her (it's a green dot this year). So - here she is!
As for her name - I figured that, since this year was the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, I'd include someone who was involved in the Apollo space programme. The Americans didn't include any female astronauts in the Apollo programme (the first women were selected for astronaut training in 1978, six years after the end of Apollo). So I decided to pick someone from the mission planning team, and the winner is... Katherine Johnson!
Katherine Johnson is a mathematician who was employed in the 1950s as a 'computer' (in the pre-digital meaning of the word) for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA - the predecessor organisation to NASA). In 1958 NACA was superseded by NASA, and Katherine moved to NASA to work as an aerospace technologist in the Spacecraft Controls Branch. She had the job of calculating space flight trajectories, including Alan Shepard's in 1961 and John Glenn's in 1962.
Katherine later became a pioneer with digital computers and helped to develop NASA's confidence with the new technology. And in 1969 she helped to calculate the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. Katherine wasn't done with Apollo there - when Apollo 13 'had a problem', she worked on the backup procedures and flight path navigation that returned the crew safely to Earth.
You can find out more about Katherine Johnson from her entry in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Johnson
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