Friday, May 12, 2006

Eleanor is Dead

Queen Eleanor was not laying, and was moving very slowly around her new domain, so I dispatched her today. She was born in Georgia, shipped to one midAtlantic state, lived in another, and died in a third. It was time to stop subjecting her to the whims of humans, and to let her return to nature.

She was buried with a buttercup and the hope that I gave her no more pain.

Today, it no longer seems so sure that her daughter was the queen who died, but it is certain that the Twain colony was reunited today, with a single queen. The nuclear colony was placed on top of the main colony, with a sheet of newsprint paper between (sliced in a few places to allow bees to start chewing through).

Mother's Day weekend here has seen a transition of generations among the bees, with mothers gone by and mothers-to-bee.

Over time, as little as a couple of days, the bees will become bewitched with the aroma of a young new queen wafting through the paper (a perfume for which they have probably been yearning for days) and will forget about the old monarch. But I won't.

2 comments:

00goddess said...

I think you did very right by her.

Phang said...

This is a bit of historical revisionism, but now I believe that Elanor flew off with a swarm, and that this was a supercedure queen. Something was truly not right with this queen: perhaps she had survived a battle to superced with another virgin queen, but got damaged in the process. I was thinking about naming the Queen I killed (Alice was the name of Eleanor Roosevelt's daughter) but that seems kind of hostile. Instead, this queen is being called Eleanor II in my records, and I am deeply sorry that she never had a chance.