Her Majesty the Queen

(Click on a picture for a close-up view)

We took a bunch of great pictures today when we opened up the hive. We found the queen in the 'nuc' hive today. Can you see her? She is in the center of the frame of the first picture, much longer than the other bees, and almost completely black. She was dipping her rear end into the cells to lay eggs. You can see how white the comb is - it was just built fresh on a frame with plastic foundation. The bees have not lined the inside of the comb with propolis yet, but the queen is laying it it anyways.

The second picture is a great example of a typical frame inside a hive. At the top of the frame the cells have been capped over - there will be baby bees in the pupa stage growing inside. Right beside them, if you look close inside each cell, you can see little white grubs curled inside. This is a baby bee in the larva stage. This larva is mature, and is being capped over. Along the bottom of the picture, it's hard to see what's inside the cells, but I saw smaller larva covered with royal jelly. You can see a bee in the bottom right corner that has dived into the cell. Just her bottom is sticking out. The worker bees secrete royal jelly from a gland in their heads, so this one is probably feeding the larva. The eggs hatch into larva within 3 days, get fed royal jelly for 5 days, then get capped over. Two weeks later - new bees!

The third picture is a frame that I put in the hive with no foundation. I had read on the internet that the bees would naturally build comb on an empty frame - plastic foundation is not necessary. In addition, the plastic foundation forces the bees to build comb that is a fraction larger than what is 'normal' for them. So I put the empty frame in to see what would happen. Instead of the smaller comb I expected, the bees built a beautifully straight frame with noticeably larger comb, and rounder, rather than the octagonal shape! Today, I saw that they used this whole frame to raise drone bees. The drones are the male bees. They are larger, so the comb is built larger, and when the cells are capped over, the cappings are raised like a bullet, to give the drone room to grow. They take an extra 3 days longer to hatch than the worker bees. If you look closely at the top of the picture where it's out of focus, just right of centre, there is a drone bee emerging from it's cell. It looks bigger than the worker bees, and the eyes on a drone are huge - they take up his whole head. I'll try and get a better picture later, to compare a drone with a worker bee.

The last picture is... HONEY!