Had to combine the hives

The new queen didn't get mated, so I had to recombine the hives.  The original hive doesn't have a queen anymore and the new hive with the queen doesn't have a lot of foragers.

Last night I used wet newspaper to create a barrier wall in the original hive.  With the original colony on one side, I put the bars from the new hive on the other side of the newspaper.  The idea is that they chew through the newspaper and by the time they get through the two colonies are acquainted and accept each other.

Today I checked on them and there are a lot of bees fighting.  I don't know if the bees found an opening along the side of the paper, or if they just went outside and came back in the other opening.  Hopefully, they get together and make peace soon, or I will be starting all over next spring.

New queens are tooting

So last night I went out to the main hive to check on the bees and started hearing a noise.  After looking around I realized it was coming from the hive.  It seems the new queens are emerging from there cells and are tooting.

I had heard about tooting before but I wasn't really familiar with it.  After googling it, it's really an interesting communication method the new queens use.  Tooting is a form of "piping".  The other form is called quacking.  Newly emerged queens toot and queens about to emerge from their cells quack, which has a different frequency and pattern.

The queens pipe by moving their flying structures without moving their wings.  The vibrations travel through the thorax and into the comb that it's thorax is pressed against.  It's thought that the queens make this noise to search for other new queens.

The first queen to emerge will travel around the hive killing other queens it finds whether they have emerged or not.  Of course, a battle ensues if the other queen has emerged.  Generally, when a new queen starts tooting, the queens still in the cells will start quacking.

The worker bees will go to a few of the quacking queens and prevent the newly emerged queen from killing them.  The workers will then keep the new queens in their cells and feed them through a slit in the top of the cell.  The workers will then release a new queen one at a time and let the new queens fight.  Sometimes both queens die in the fight, so this process helps to prevent the colony from going queenless.

I managed to record the tooting with my phone.  It's not the best recording, but you can search YouTube for some good recordings.