In the Mississippi woods, queens for South Dakota's hives are born. Kelvin Adee explains queening as he holds a line of queen cups that are used to mimic a queen cell to trick nursing bees into raising more queens. These queens are later placed into split hives to produce new colonies of bees that will be delivered to South Dakota in May for the spring honey season.
by Spencer Cody
Edmunds Central School
Twelve teachers from 10 school districts from throughout South Dakota joined Edmunds Central students in the Queening Institute hosted by the Edmunds Central School District and Adee Honey made possible by Specialty Crop Block Grant funding through the USDA.
The Queening Institute left Roscoe on a bus on March 13 and picked up teachers at stops along the way as they traveled to the institute site location in Woodville, Mississippi.
During the institute in Mississippi, teachers and students learned about how Adee Honey maintains its vast numbers of hives through its queening and hive splitting operation in Woodville. Kelvin Adee and his family along with other Adee Honey employees were so gracious to take the time to show us every aspect of new hive formation.
Since the Woodville facility attempts to split more than 10,000 hives into 30,000+ new hives each spring, it is a remarkable location to see all facets of queening and hive formation occurring at the same time on an incredible scale overlapping each other. Such a complex operation is needed to replace lost hives due to all the pressures placed on them including diseases, parasites, and human-made chemicals.
Basically, hives can be tricked into producing new queens if part of the hive is separated from its queen by an excluder, which is a barrier that keeps the queen in a separate part of the hive to prevent her from destroying the introduced queen cells. If larva are manually placed in little plastic cups that mimic queen cells, nurse bees will keep feeding them to produce new queens if placed into the excluded portion of the hive away from the queen.
A few days later the developed queen cells are removed and placed into split hives to form a new functioning hive. All of this is needed on a large scale to allow the honey and pollination industries the ability to maintain hive numbers against immense annual losses.
Participating teachers in the institute are tasked with developing curriculum for their classroom incorporating the commercial impact of South Dakota's bees into curriculum. Once the curriculum is assembled across multiple cohort years, it will be made available to a wide audience to encourage education on issues that face our honey bees.
We extend our sincere thanks to Kelvin Adee and his family and Adee Honey Farms who helped make this institute possible through hosting our visit to Woodville.
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