What an interesting question, Shaz!
Let me correct something first on this note, then I'll address your real question.
<<"You mentioned in the podcast your hypothesis about the queen needing sunlight on her maiden flight and that keeping bees indoors was inhumane.">>
Actually what I said was that the queen needs sunlight on both her maiden flight AND her annual swarm flight. The reason for that is that she lives in darkness all year, laying thousands upon thousands of eggs. In her maiden flight she mated with 12-20 drones and is fertile for 5-6 years. She is perpetually pregnant with all that sperm for all those years as long as humans don't screw it up.
Each year a normal colony departs the hive and heads out to look for a new home where they will begin a new colony with their old queen. They left behind a set of baby queen eggs who will hatch out soon after the swarm departs and the left-behind colony will have a new queen.
The OLD QUEEN only mated that one time, yet she stays fertile year after year. The reason she stays fertile is .... (drumroll) because the sun's light on her body recharges her hormones and that perks up her fertility again for another year.
Human-thinking-alert: --- Most beekeepers find swarming to be problematic because the colony significantly slows down on honey production during that time between swarm leaving and young queen and baby bees maturing. If we could only prevent them from swarming, we wouldn't lose so much honey-production time. So, let's prevent swarming.
So we humans decided to initiate a bunch of swarm prevention techniques like doing splits or breaking off queen eggs (a swarm won't leave without knowing new imminent queens are about to hatch), and doing annual queen-replacement. When you ask why a beekeeper will replace their queens annually, they'll often tell you it's because the queen's fertility declines anyway, so she has to be replaced.
But queen replacement is terribly traumatic to the colony who deeply loves their Queen, their real mother. The reason the queen's fertility declines is because she wasn't permitted to swarm and have the sun renew her hormones and fertility. If you keep her in the dark, she can't stay fertile.
It's all very
common sense when you look at it this way. Let the colony do what their nature requests of them, and then support the colony's choices. Their nature tells them to swarm annually -- thus keeping the Queen fertile -- so that's what we ought to encourage.
Jacqueline
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