Bee-Checkup - Week 3

It's been three weeks since the ladies arrived. (Dave asked me to explain why I call them ladies...) Most of the bees in a hive are female, with only the drones being male. Only about 200 - 1000 of the up to 60,000 bees in a typical hive are drones. Because drones don't really do anything for the production of the hive, they are kicked out in the fall by the worker bees, so in the winter the entire hive is exclusively female. Additionally, drones don't have the ability to sting, because the bee's stinger is part of the female egg-laying mechanism.

The bees have moved up into the second super, and there are eggs and larvae present. They are only on a couple of the frames at this point so we decided not to add the third super.

6/2 Hive Inspection

In the frame above you can see that we've moved into the next phase of development in the hive. There are two things now clearly visible that we didn't have during the last inspection. The white area at the top of the frame is capped honey. That's honey that has been ripened by the bees by altering the moisture content and then sealed away in wax for later use. In the middle and bottom of the frame you see cells that are capped with a yellow colored wax. That's capped brood. Inside those capped cells the bee larvae are spinning cocoons and entering the pupa stage before they emerge as young bees.

The empty cell group in the center is an area where bees have already emerged. The bees will clean out those "used" cells and the queen will lay in those areas again and repeat the process.

Here's a closer view one of the frames. You'll notice that that the bees are much more interested in what they're working on to really be bothered with trying to attack. This is a nice solid pattern of brood, so it looks like our queen is probably doing just fine. We looked for her this week, but she didn't want to come out and show herself.

In the two pictures above, the bees have pulled out comb on the entire face of the frame. On some of the frames they still have work to do. This is one of the frames from the second super that a group of worker bees is working on building comb. The black plastic foundation is embossed with the comb pattern and comes pre-dipped in a very light coat of bees wax and the bees pretty much take it from there.

The most frequently asked question so far from people is how soon will you get honey??? We won't really know that until we see how long it takes the girls to get everything set up. We may get a little, we may not get any this year. Once they have comb built they then need to store about 150 lbs of honey for their own use to sustain them through the winter. Once THAT is complete then any excess we can take as our harvest. Next year since they'll already have all of the combs pulled out, they'll spend much more of their energy on increasing the size of the colony and making honey. Time will tell!