Introducing Her Royal Highness...

I'm bringing home a baby honeybee
won't my Mommy be so proud of me!

Extremely cold and long...winters in our Northern town can be hard on everyone, including girls trying to keep warm in their hives. Sadly, we lost Queen Caroline and her entire hive to an early cold snap. Lady Gaga's hive was knocked over by uninvited house guests...don't get me started about those pesky elk. And yet...somehow Lady Gaga and the rest of the hive survived!

Dean, anxious to bring his bee population up in numbers brought home a new queen plus 10,000 of her closest bee girlfriends to move into Caroline's hive.

Once moved into the new hive, the girls need time to settle in. Then cross your fingers to make sure they stay.

This is the queen's royal coach that Dean is removing from the hive. The queen lives in this tiny box for the first few days in the hive so she begins to smell like the hive. The girlfriends efficiently eat away the small sugar plug in one end of the royal coach and free her!

Slowly, Dean pulls frame after frame out of the hive to check on the progress of the girls. And things are looking good...the hive appears to be healthy and growing.

But to be sure...he will need to find the queen. It is quite literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. One queen among 10,000 girlfriends.

Wait what's this...could it be? Look just below the yellow stick. She's longer and bigger than the other girls.

Introducing... Queen Kate Middleton...The Duchess of Honeybridge.

And there are many buzzy days ahead for Queen Kate!

Fortunately the bee master had a scientific assistant for the day.