This whole swarming story leads us up to today, that is Sunday, July 10. I visited the hive this afternoon at around noon. There wasn’t too much wind, and it’s been a nice, sunny day – all day. I noticed there wasn’t very many bees coming out of and going into the hive (maybe two or three every five seconds or so), which is lower than what I would expect, from the past (even when we first hived the swarm – there were still more bees coming out of and going into the hive). So I immediately worried: “Maybe they’ve left!? Who knows?” Looking strait into the hive entrance (from some short distance away), I didn’t see many bees on the bottom board. The next step I decided was to listen to the hive with my ear pressed close to one of the supers – to see if I could hear any bees in there. There was a lot of noise in there (whew!), but the most interesting noise I heard was this:
Piping (From a recording at Internet Archive)
Hey! There’s a queen in there! This is exactly the sound I heard, except it was a little higher pitch. Who knows if this is the queen we rescued – we should have marked her – now we’ll never know. I’m also sure that I heard the piping of a queen sequestered in a cell answering this queen. That’s the lower pitch piping that’s heard on the recording – called “quacking”.
Why do they pipe? It’s not known, but it seems that it’s a call and response between virgin queens.
Here are some videos of bee piping:
Piping. It’s said sometimes that this is a really loud phenomena.
Here’s another blogger’s discussion:http://thebeejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/queen-piping-and-hive-sounds.html She also links to acbees.
And, finally here’s an article on Eddie Wood, a sound engineer who postulated how a bee could make those sounds with her spiracles. It has a good discussion of how sound is produced, the difference in how frequencies are modified between woodwinds, brass, and plain ‘ole open whistles. Eddie developed an instrument called the Apidictor to detect when a hive was about to swarm, using the sounds of nurse bees (the nurse bee warble). The technology hasn’t really ever caught on.
The big question is… Are our bees going to be ok? Will they have a good queen? The next inspection will be on the first nice day between the eighteenth and twenty first. We’ll know then!