The Story of Celestial Bronze

Nobody knew the age of Queen Celeste when she and her hive were delivered to Noble Path Apiary one warm spring night. She was maybe one or two years old. As a well-established beehive, her colony contained about 40-50 thousand daughters and two or three thousand sons, give or take a few thousand.

If human observers were around when Queen Celeste was just a new egg growing inside a cell, they didn’t note the date, nor the date when she emerged from that cell into queenhood. What we know is that she emerged from her queen cell before any of the other queen candidates. She was first, and in one of her first acts, she killed the sisters who would’ve been queen, sealing her role. If she hadn’t emerged first, she would be killed by the one who did.

From that early focus on death, she would pivot to an exclusive focus on birth. In the role of queen, her lifetime would be spent inside the dark, warm softly humming hive, focused almost exclusively on laying eggs. Daily, queen bees lay an average of 1,500 eggs, meeting the reproductive needs of the hive. Given the perfect hive space and environment, and without disruption, a queen will remain a queen for 3-5 years.

Despite the human stereotype about queen bees, Celeste laid eggs (fertilized to make female bees, or unfertilized to make drone/male bees) based on what her daughters told her to do. The size of the cells her daughters built in the honeycomb mapped those directions. It was her daughters who determined which type of egg she laid, and it’s in this way that the queen takes orders from the thousands of worker bees, her daughters.

Celeste’s hive enduring a couple hard times. Her colony initially occupied 25 frames, organized side-by-side in a horizontal hive. Late in the summer of 2021, due to exceptionally hot temps in the area, the bees responded by bringing more water into the hive to try to cool it down. Excess moisture built up in the horizontal hive, probably due to bad air circulation and a lack of a ‘chimney effect.’ At the same time, the hive’s oldest and most experienced bees (the pollen/nectar foragers) accidentally collected and brought fungal spores into the hive. The fungus, called Chalkbrood, spread rapidly and killed hundreds of baby bees, turning them into grey desiccated mummies that looked like pieces of chalk. The colony was under threat of collapse.

Treatment advice ranged. Chalkbrood is a rare condition in this dry suburban area, and many beekeepers advised that the queen may be responsible for offspring with lowered immune-systems and should be killed and replaced.

Ultimately, the decision was made to help the hive by solving the airflow issue. The infected frames into a traditional Langstroth beehive, a format that inherently creates a chimney effect by using stacked boxes similar to those you may see along the side of the freeway and near backroad orchards. It was estimated that the fungal spores could reside in the frames for upwards of 10 years if left alone, so the horizontal hive was torched after the bees were relocated. The bees adjusted to their new home, and they filled the space in two deep Langstroth bee boxes, each containing 10 frames. It seemed that the colony would survive as the ‘undertaker bees’ cleared out the dead baby bees and queen Celestial Bronze replace them with new eggs.

However, in December of 2021, tragedy struck the newly recovered hive. Mites (varroa destructor) are a constant threat to any bee colony. Not simply because they feed on the bodies of the bees, but primarily because they are vectors. Varroa mites are carriers of dozens of viruses that creep in quietly and can cause a healthy hive of bees to collapse. In fact, the bigger the hive, the more mites can overwhelm a colony.

On a cold, sunny winter day in December, Celeste’s hive collapsed from the harmful effects of viruses carried by mites. Without the thousands of bees keeping the hive warm against the winter cold, more succumbed to the conditions. When she was found, she was nearly alone inside the empty, dead hive. With cold winter temperatures all around her, death from exposure would be a matter of time. She was found in the center of a ball of about 15 bees desperately tried to keep her warm. Bees will sacrifice themselves for their queen (for she is their future) without hesitation.

She and her 15 daughters were collected and placed in a warm cardboard box and brought indoors for the night. They were given water and honey, and they were protected.

As is often the case in the beekeeping community, help came swiftly when word got out that a colony was in trouble and the queen was struggling. A local keeper donated four frames of bees (about 25,000 bees) and Celeste was paired with these new bees in a new hive box. The newly formed colony was placed in the Noble Path bee yard, and all fingers were crossed, hoping she would survive for the remainder of the winter.

When late winter passed, it was clear that Celeste had not only survived but was well on her way to building a new empire. Hundreds of new bees were born, and the hive grew rapidly. Another box was added above the lower box and Celeste continued to lay eggs until two full boxes of bees (approximately 60,000 bees, give or take) were able to do what some would call a miracle. They went on to make enough honey to fill a “honey super” with ten medium sized frames of capped honey. The energy and effort it took for Celeste and her daughters to not only recover from colony collapse but to go on to fill a honey super was amazing to witness.

It is the policy of Noble Path Apiary, as it is with most beekeepers, to only harvest and extract honey from hives that have created more honey than they will use in a year. In June 2022, Celeste’s daughters filled several additional frames with nectar and dehydrated it over time, finally capping each cell with wax. This honey was carefully harvested from their hive, extracted through spinning, lightly filtered, and lovingly bottled. It is from this hive that YOUR jar of honey has come to be in your possession.

On average, approximately two million flowers are visited by about 1,00 bees to make 12 ounces of honey. As you enjoy your special jar of liquid gold, please make it a ritual to pause and reflect on the lives and labor that went into every drop you savor. Let your heart be filled with gratitude for the common honeybee and her dedication to her queen and her hive.

Epilogue

Queen Celestial Bronze was given her name based on the mined material ‘celestial bronze’ noted in the Percy Jackson book series authored by Rick Roirdan. Although we called her Celeste for short, we often referred to her by her full name, which references the sky (celestial) and a strong metal (bronze). Despite her strength, her age caught up with her and in August of 2022, she passed away from unknown causes. Celeste will always be remembered as a survivor.

Her daughters and sons now reside under their new queen, name to be determined.