Queen ElizaBEEth
So, I don't mean to alarm you, but sometimes I kill bees. On purpose. And get paid for it. I rain undeserved death upon them like some kind of vengeful old testament god, and then maybe I'll come home and save an individual bee from drowning in my pool.
Or for example on Friday, I received a call that an irrigation box in a busy parking lot in Tustin was full of bees and had to receive a dose of fire and brimstone.
After I'd killed several tens of thousands of them outright and reduced their city into a jumbled mess in a five gallon plastic bucket I happened to notice one particular bee a crawling on the ground. This bee, it so happens, was the queen bee (recognizable by the 50% longer abdomen). Something warmed the cockles of my cold clammy coal-like heart, and I took her carefully into my hand and took her with me when I departed (after having veritably salted the earth to ensure life did not continue at her old home).
I went about the rest of the day with her on my hand. I'd had a previous pet queen bee named Bee-opatra but she only lived about 24 hours in human care. Queens are often shipped about and can live several days in a small cage with a number of worker bee attendants, but I'm curious how long I can keep one alive without the worker attendants.
The naming convention I've come up with is pet worker bees I name as "honeybee" in other languages (ex: Melissa and Devra), and queen bees I name with bee pun queen names (Poke-ahontas and Beeopatra), so Kori and I decided this one should be named Queen ElizaBEEth. We've tended to shorten that to Elizabee.
At the end of the day I fed her some honey (via a dab on the end of a finger, which she proceeded to lap up with her bee tongue). In her escape from the apocalypse I was wreaking upon her home she had somehow become completely covered in honey. She had managed to get nearly all of it off by the end of the day except some on her back where she couldn't reach and to which her left wing (or rather her left two wings, since I'm sure you're about to point out that bees by definition have four wings) had become adhered, rendering them useless. Kori brought bee care to a new level by using a droplet of water on the end of a toothpick in conjunction with a tiny corner of a tissue to wash off the remaining honey.
Elizabee also had a pretty big gash on the side of her abdomen, which I feared would be a likely cause of mortality.
We also prepared a bowl for her to live in, with two little chunks of the honeycomb from her hive. One of the pieces of comb I washed off (and it therefore retained water in the cells, they are designed such that water surface tension tends to keep water in them from flowing out, and we put some honey in some of its cells. The other comb we didn't wash and it already had some honey in some cells. We also placed some water in the bowl of a plastic spoon (with the handle broken off and removed). It appears she prefers the comb that wasn't washed, and prefers to either hang out on top of it or sometimes crawl under it. When I put my finger in she usually eagerly crawls onto it -- I think probably because it's nice and warm. They like to ideally keep their temperature at 95 degrees (though they can let it drop into the 60s without dying and will do so to save on their fuel bills. Though technically cold blooded they can actually generate heat by de-coupling their wing muscles and vibrating them, but I digress)
Kori spends some quality time with Elizabee.
Elizabee has now been away from other bees for nearly 60 hours and appears to be going strong. She looked a little depressed earlier in the afternoon though. Kori thinks she might be bored or lonely without other bee-friends. So I try to take her out and let her crawl around my arm every now and then. We were also curious if she would lay eggs in the cells of the honeycomb provided, but so far she has declined. Her injury may account for her lack of egg laying as it is near her egg-laying bits (I've dissected queens under microscope at Davis and examined their egg-laying bits), though she may also have taken note that she is NOT in a beehive and there are no attendant bees to care for her eggs.
I think I'd be hard pressed to care for bee eggs myself (they would need to be fed and eventually the cell they were laid in would need to have a wax cap put over it). To that end and as a general next stage of the experiment, I'm thinking about getting some nurse bees from another hive and introducing them into the bee bee-rarium. Worker bees spend their first few days of life doing nursing activities and caring for the queen. Ideally selecting some bees the moment they hatched would be ideal for this but that would be tedious so I might just have to settle for finding some that appear to be doing those duties and corralling them.
With the introduction of nurse bees it would no longer be a unique "how long can a queen bee survive on direct human care" experiment, but it would still be interesting since I'd still be micromanaging a tiny hive-simulation environment. Such experiments in bee micromanagement should result in greater insights and understandings of what specifically and exactly bees need.