If you put your ear to the hive wall in the evening when a colony is about to swarm, you will hear the voices of the queen in the hive. Some of the sounds of the queen’s singing are like the sounds of a small wooden piper, as children amuse themselves with. We call it like a bee queen is piping. Other sounds are like the quacking of little ducklings when they are weaned by someone from an old duck.
What is the cause of these sounds?
Both sounds come from young queens. The reason for this piping and quacking is their mutual hatred for each other.
When the old queen leaves with the first swarm, there will be no new young queen in the hive at that moment. But there will be mature queen. As soon as a young queen comes out of the first mature queen cell she starts singing ‘tee-tee-tee-tee’. Hearing this voice, the other queens that have not emerged will be afraid to come out, so that they will not be killed by the first queen that is walking free. Though they are quite ready, they are still sitting on purpose in the queen cells, and the bees feed them through a small hole at the bottom. In this prison, the young queen bees make ‘qua-qua-qua-qua’ sounds.
The first queen to emerge tries to kill those sitting in the queen cells. If the bees have no desire to swarm and do not hinder her access, she goes from one queen cell to another, chews a hole in the side with her jaws and kills the queens with her sting. Her jaws are so strong and she acts so skilfully that she can cut through the bottom of the queen cell in an instant, after which the bees pull out the corpses and destroy the remaining cells, which are not yet ripe.
If the bees intend to swarm, they surround the queen cells and prevent the first queen to emerge from the cell from destroying them. Then she makes her ‘ti-ti-ti’ sounds with anger. The queens in the cells respond with their ‘qua-qua-qua-qua’.
So, the singing comes from the queen, which has already hatched and walks freely among the bees, and as she passes over all the honeycombs of the nest, she can be heard in different places, as if several queens were singing. The quacking belongs to the queens still in the cells, and as these are usually scattered all over the nest, the quacking can be heard in different places of the hive and in different voices.
What do these sounds mean?
Therefore, the singing of a queen in the hive means, firstly, that there is a young, new-born queen in the hive. Because the old, fertilised one never sings in the hive, except when after a long imprisonment in the cage she is released between the bees and she smells in the hive placed queen cells or a ready young queen, she makes a few quiet sounds. Secondly, the singing of a queen means that there are other queens in the hive besides her, for a young queen does not sing if she is alone in the hive. Thirdly, the singing of the queen is a sure sign that the colony will still swarm. When the singing and quacking cease, she will certainly not swarm any more.
On the first day after birth, the singing of the queen is quiet and weak, but on the next day and on the third day it becomes so loud that sometimes it can be heard several steps away from the hive. Young queens sing and quack more at sunrise and sunset, but also during the daytime they are constantly responding.
Conclusion
Thus, an event such as piping and quacking of queen bees once again confirms the fact that the bee colony is a highly organised system. In the process of evolution it has developed its own unique survival mechanisms.
