For Japanese honeybees, one obvious source of stress is, of course, the giant hornet.
Then there’s the tracheal mite.
And when the hive becomes too cramped, or during a summer heat wave, there’s the risk of the comb collapsing.
There are also wax moth larvae—what we call sumushi—getting into the hive.
Even these girls, trying to survive out there in the natural world
(and please don’t start asking, “Hey, what happened to the drones?!”),
have all kinds of problems to deal with.
But we’ll save the rest of the story about WOW-chan for another day, and return once again to our Western honeybees.
Speaking of stress on the hive, something happened a couple of years ago.
There was one hive with a queen whose back leg was impaired.
She was an excellent layer, and the colony had a wonderful energy and strength.
She was one of our favorite queens—the one we were always rooting for.
We loved looking in on that colony, so we would often go visit her, thinking,
“How are you doing today?”
But one day, the queen suddenly disappeared, and before long, the colony itself was gone.
Looking back, I think we may have been putting quite a bit of stress on them every time we opened the hive.
And maybe—just maybe—we were actually the ones who injured her leg.
After that, we started making a conscious effort not to inspect the hives unnecessarily, and not to try to find the queen every single time.
Except during the spring, when colonies are growing rapidly and preparing to swarm, we leave at least two weeks between inspections.
If we happen to spot the queen within the first two or three frames, great.
That’s a lucky day.
Otherwise, as long as we see eggs and young larvae, we say,
“This colony is okay.”
Is the hive calm, too?
Then that’s enough.
We have to resist the urge to find her just because we want to see her.
Somehow, it feels a little like Zen practice.