About Me

My photo
My tremendously supportive husband & I have 3 wonderful children, 1 dog, 12 laying hens, 2 dairy goats, 3 bee hives, and a 2000 sq foot vegetable garden on a small 1/4 acre lot in the city. In the center of it all is our small 1,000 sq foot house purchased in 2008 as a foreclosure that we fully renovated to host our growing family, home school adventures, and small home business (CozyLeaf.com). We have a desire to learn a path to self sufficiency finding ways to be good stewards of the resources God has given us. We want to learn to live with less as we laydown roots to our little homestead.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Queen Bee Piping!! Videos of our new Queen Piping!

First, I would like to say that I am quite gullible! I will believe pretty much anything Bryan tells me, so of course YES he does trick me sometimes and YES I do believe him! We ordered a queen bee for one of our colonies. Bryan put her into the top bar hive and what happened next brought on quite an interesting dialogue!

Dialogue as follows...
Bryan:  "Our new queen is Piping"
Abby: "Ok....wait, What!?"
Bryan: "Virgin Queen bees will make a noise (insert his impersonation of the noise here) when they enter a new colony and its called Piping".
Abby: (laughing, thinking this is really a stretch for him to make this up!) "WHAAAT!?!? Are you messing with me? Cause I really thing you are messing with me!?"
Bryan: "No Im serious. Shes doing it right now!"
Abby: "WHAAAT!" (while running for the camera!

Ok folks...As if bees could be any more amazing, they go off and do something like this!! 
Piping: "Piping describes a noise made by virgin and mated queen bees during certain times of the virgin queens' development. Fully developed virgin queens communicate through vibratory signals: "quacking" from virgin queens in their queen cells and "tooting" from queens free in the colony, collectively known as piping. A virgin queen may frequently pipe before she emerges from her cell and for a brief time afterwards. Mated queens may briefly pipe after being released in a hive.
Piping is most common when there is more than one queen in a hive. It is postulated that the piping is a form of battle cry announcing to competing queens and the workers their willingness to fight. It may also be a signal to the worker bees which queen is the most worthwhile to support.
The piping sound is a G or A. The adult queen pipes for a two-second pulse followed by a series of quarter-second toots.[2] The queens of Africanized bees produce more vigorous and frequent bouts of piping."

Bryan was able to get several good videos of her piping...listen careful, its quite impressive!!



No comments:

Post a Comment