Hello Friends,
A couple of quick notes first. We will be closed tomorrow, June 19th, for Juneteenth. We will reopen again on Saturday, June 20th at 10am, for Life-Sized Candyland, from 3:30pm-5:00pm in our Atrium. Costumes are encouraged, of course, for your trip through the Peppermint Forest, Lollipop Woods, and Gumdrop Pass! **Note Skidompha will be closed between 2 and 3:30 so we may set up for Candyland.
While we will be closed during the day on 6/19, we will open our doors for a performance by Novel Jazz that evening from 7-9:30pm. The concert theme is “Jazz on a Summer Day,” and Novel Jazz will perform music out of the Great American Songbook, with special emphasis on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. Admission is free and open to the public, but Skidompha always welcomes financial donations (suggested $20.00/person). We also encourage donations of food and personal hygiene items for the Library’s Little Free Pantry. Pantry items must be unopened and not expired.
A bee update!
The bees “swarmed” while we were closed last weekend. The hive is a lot less crowded as the old queen left the hive with a portion of her workers to find a new home and create a new colony. This is a natural behavior for the bees and a means to propagate their colony numbers.
Bee swarming follows a specific process. The hive decides to swarm, and in response, workers create queen cells to rear potential new queens. These are easily recognized as they hang off the comb, are larger, and look for all the world like an unshelled peanut. Really. I took a picture of a queen cell and will include it above. If you stop by this week, you may be able to find that cell, and maybe others, as the workers build it up.
The original laying queen will leave the hive along with her followers around the day that the first of the maturing queen cells are capped. She will alight on a nearby perch where her followers will find her by her pheromones, and land around her. You will may see a veritable cloud of bees around her if you are so fortunate to witness this process, and you may take solace that the bees are at their least aggressive at this time as they have no home to protect.
Seven days after capping, the first of the newly developed virgin queens emerges. The first queen to emerge from her cell will then seek out the remaining queen cells and kill her potential rivals inside. If other queens emerge at the same time, they will seek each other out and battle to the death to rule the hive. During that time, the queen or queens will often emit a piping/quacking/tooting noise, along with pheromones, to introduce themselves to the hive. This noise is created by the queen pressing her thorax down against the comb and vibrating her thoracic wing muscles. Her wings remain closed, and the comb vibrates and amplifies the sound in the hive. Queen piping usually resonates around 400 Hz and consists of one or more 1-second-long pulses, followed by a number of much shorter tones. The frequency of tooting has been shown to be age-related. It starts at ~350 Hz and rises in frequency to around 500 Hz as the virgin queen matures over several days.
For more information, check out:
Grooters, H. J. (1987) Influences of queen piping and worker behaviour on the timing of emergence of honeybee queens. Insec. Sociaux 34(3), 181–193.
Tarpy, David R. et al. “Levels of selection in a social insect: a review of conflict and cooperation during honey bee (Apis mellifera) queen replacement.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 55 (2004): 513-523,
Ramsey MT, Bencsik M, Newton MI, Reyes M, Pioz M, Crauser D, Delso NS, Le Conte Y. The prediction of swarming in honeybee colonies using vibrational spectra. Sci Rep. 2020 Jun 16;10(1):9798. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-66115-5. PMID: 32546693; PMCID: PMC7298004.
Have a great weekend and bee well (I had to),
Matthew
Matthew Graff
Executive Director
Skidompha Public Library