Hives at Work

Our first objective in checking our hives this week was to see how hive 04 was managing with their brood production.  One week ago, we noticed that hive 04 had a couple of frames full of brood, while the other hives had very little or no brood.  We anticipated that we might need to switch frames between hive 04 and the others to spread the brood population between the hives, and end up with a balance of brood between all hives. 

Yesterday, we were very happy to see that hive 04 now had several frames of brood.  We were able to swap one frame between hive 04 and 01 and also between hive 04 and 03, both of which had practically no brood.  Now, hive 01 and 03 have larvae to tend to and a future generation of bees, while they (and we) work out their queen situations.


Frame from hive 04 full of brood.  (Click on photo to enlarge). Notice the white larvae curled in the uncapped cells. The bees keep these cells open in order to feed the larvae.  The brown capped cells hold pupae, which are larvae that have developed a cocoon, soon to hatch. The dark empty cells are cells from which the juvenile bees have hatched.

Yesterday, we also found our newly installed queen in hive 02 hard at work.  This was the highlight of our day.  Mark has the eyes of a hawk and noticed the queen right away.  Like proud parents, we took this video of her while she was laying her eggs.  It's hard to believe, but it's true...a queen lays up to 1,500 eggs each day.  It is fascinating to watch her work and to watch the bees around her and how they respond to her presence.  At one point in the video, you can see she had trouble laying an egg in the cell when it was "stuck" to her.  She uses her back legs to remove it.

 

If you wish to watch a more enhanced version of this video, click here to view it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/42dF32tM5vk.