The simple answer to this is ‘no’. In reality, beekeepers replicate the social structure of bees as they would live in the wild. So to understand the principles and practices of modern beekeeping, it helps to first understand some basics of natural bee behaviour. A colony of honey bees is made up of one Queen and a varying number of female workers (several tens of thousands) and just a few hundred male drones. the queen bee in the picture here is marked with a posca pen coloured dot, making it easier for the beekeeper to find her. Not all beekeepers do this (many do, but I generally don’t). A new swarm will generally contain around 20,000 bees, while an established colony may comprise up to 60,000, possibly more. Colony size fluctuates throughout the year: more in summer: less in winter. The majority are infertile female worker bees who do all the work (clue’s in the name), progressing through a hierarchy of essential tasks over the course of their short lives, ranging from nursery duty (feeding and cleaning up after the babies) to door-guard, housekeeper, food collection, storage and production, and of course the important duty of attending to the Queen, whose only purpose in life is to lay eggs.
Within her first week of life, the new-emerged virgin Queen will leave the hive on her ‘maiden flight’, seeking out a crowd of male drones (they fly in groups hoping to find available queens. Mating with a queen is the male drone’s primary purpose. However, only a few actually get ‘lucky’, and it will be quite a brief encounter – a mid-air union that leaves his genitals ripped from his body and embedded inside the queen … He then falls to the ground and dies, while she moves on to the next suitor, who will removed the remains of the previous contender before entering herself. Romantic, eh.
The mated queen then returns to the hive, and settles down to the important work of laying eggs, up to two thousand every day – for her entire life (with a few days off over midwinter). A queen may have mated with up to fifteen drones on that one occasion. Those drones may be infected with any of the many diseases currently contributing to bee decline; they may be carrying virus or bacterial infection (which then gets passed onto the colony, who then spread it to other colonies) or be genetically prone to certain health problems and behavioural tendencies. For this reason some beekeepers – particularly those working large-scale – prefer to buy in queens that have been artificially inseminated by drones bred specifically to be good tempered and disease-free – as opposed to allowing their queens to fly off and mate randomly with bees of unknown genetic profile and potential health risk. In the wild a colony will periodically raise a new queen to replace the old, in an attempt to eradicate disease and other problems, or when the Queen gets too old to continue laying. Beekeepers simply replicate this natural behaviour, utilising the wonders of modern science to mate and/or replace the queen as and when needed. But not all beekeepers. As a small-scale hobbyist, I allow my colonies to raise their own queens – as and when they decide they need – and allow these queens to do their own natural thing, flying off to mate where, when, and with whom, they choose. This of course brings it’s own complications; the queen may not return – or she may return un-mated and unable to lay the essential fertilised eggs: thus the colony may die (unless they are quick to raise another new queen who does then successfully mate). Or she may return, carrying disease infection – necessitating a whole array of prevention and treatment interventions. For these reasons, larger scale industrial beekeepers (working with thousands of hives over a large geographical area) often choose to ‘manage’ their workload by controlling the queen, using far different methods to those employed by a small-scale or hobby beekeeper, such as myself.
Somewhere in west Cornwall 