To bee an assassin

I'm having the first year in my bee yard where I feel like I have a clue. Only a clue, but it's better than nothing.

I started the season with 4 hives, all 4 had survived the winter. I divided the strongest ones early, making 6 out of the 4. I have pulled off what will turn into around 20-25gallons of honey as soon as I go through the arduous task of extracting it from the comb.

Last week I dethroned 2 queens who weren't performing up-to-snuff, replacing them with a pair I bought from a local breeder. (that idea lends itself well to all kinds of child-rearing applications, doesn't it?) The idea is to go into the upcoming winter with a queen who is producing a lot of eggs so the population that has to go through the winter is as large as possible.

The guy I bought the queens from showed me his operation - very interesting. He is selectively breeding queens for their gentleness (always good for bees), their parasite resistance, and their ability to survive our winters. Amazing, because he and his wife control the entire gene pool by not only selecting the queens from the colony, but they also artificially inseminate the queen from males in known colonies. Yes. Artificially inseminate. I was pretty amazed that you could do this with the tiny little queen, but even more, that you could to the "removal" from the little tiny male.

Think about it.

Anyway, one of the beekeeper tasks is to know the environmental threats to the bees and control them as much as you can. The other day I was out in my beeyard and I spotted an amazing creature...a threat to bees but not really a problem for a beekeeper. He is called an assassin bug. This guy is about an inch long, and appears to be armor plated. He has hexagon shaped plates covering him, and a large, curved proboscis that reminds you of a Samari sword. He was holding one of my unfortunate honeybees in his front hands like we hold corn-on-the-cob, turning and nibbling. Very impressive.

The good thing, my colonies are very full and each have about 50-60 thousand bees in them. There's plenty of food for Mr Assassin Bug and plenty left to get my colonies through the winter. Cooperating with the natural world, I let him keep nibbling.

Poor, unfortunate bee.