There could now be twice as many bees in the hive as
compared to when I first installed the package in late April.
There is definite nectar and pollen storage going on. Water from some of the nectar is evaporating,
and some of the stored treasure has probably turned into honey. (Yes, I robbed a one-inch block of the comb
and had a tiny taste. Golden and delicious.)
But back to what’s happening in the hive: There’s even some propyls usage going on
because the boxes (supers) and the hive frames had to be pried apart. While I’m
not experienced enough yet to really pick out the bee eggs in the cells in
their various stages of development, SURELY the queen is laying and the larvae
are developing to maturity. I base this
conclusion on two clues…. the sheer number of worker bees in the hive and the
math. Based on how long the colony has
been in the hive, at least one, and possibly two, generations of worker bees
have had time to mature to worker status.
(A regular worker bee egg takes 21 days to mature.)
A key task of any hive inspection is to check on the
queen. It took a few minutes, but I
found her! Right there in the central section of the top super. Exactly where
she was supposed to be.
My hive system is an eight-frame system, so the bottom two
medium-sized boxes (or supers) form the brood super. This is where the queen lays her eggs. As the frames in the brood
super fill up, the queen typically works her way up the hive structure. My queen followed protocol. Since the second
super literally was full of nectar, pollen and,
I’m assuming, larvae, she has moved up the hive to the third super. She’s got plenty of room there to lay. And, the workers have plenty of space to
store their harvest.
But back to the queen. The queen is easy to spot because she has a big red dot on
her mid-section. The queen is also significantly bigger than
the worker bees….both in length and girth.
Some day in the future, I should be able to spot the queen without the aid of the
colored dot. Until then, it was worth
the extra $5 I paid to the beekeeper - whose whole business model is based on
breeding queens – to put the dot on my queen.
As a side note, the color of the dot changes from year to year as a
means of keeping track of the age of the queens. Apparently, red is the color of 2013.
The queen is a big deal. She’s the lifeblood of the whole
system. Without her, things go wrong.
Really wrong. Even deathly wrong
for the colony.
You can just imagine that I’m holding my breath during the inspection until I spot her and her tell-tale red dot! Big sigh of relief when I spot her.
You can just imagine that I’m holding my breath during the inspection until I spot her and her tell-tale red dot! Big sigh of relief when I spot her.
In addition to inspecting the hive today, I removed the top feeder and I added the
queen excluder and a fourth super.
The top feeder is a fairly new addition to beekeeping hardware technology. (It didn't exist 35 years ago when my Dad kept bees in our backyard.) The top feeder is a shallow super that sits on the top of the hive and is filled with sugar water. The design creates a screened "trough" that lets the bees feed on the sugar water without drowning in it.
Beekeepers use a feeder in at least two circumstances: First, when a colony is newly installed into a hive as a way to jumpstart the hive, until the bees find their nectar and pollen sources; and second, in the winter when the colony has consumed its food stores, the weather is still too cold for them to forage and the nectar flow hasn't yet started. There are definite advantages to using a top feeder as compared to other feeding systems. You don't have to open the hive and the bees don't have to go outside to feed.
Meanwhile, the queen excluder I added is a nifty sheet of plastic mesh, like a grate, on which the uniform slots are big enough for the worker bees to pass through but too small for the queen to pass through. Above the queen excluder is yet another super, empty except for the eight frames and their foundation comb.
In a text-book scenario, the worker bees should eventually fill this top super with honey. Nothing but honey! Who knows, maybe we’ll get a tiny harvest before the season ends. (Not that I know how to rob the hive...because, of course, I don't. But I'm up for some on-the-job training.)
The top feeder is a fairly new addition to beekeeping hardware technology. (It didn't exist 35 years ago when my Dad kept bees in our backyard.) The top feeder is a shallow super that sits on the top of the hive and is filled with sugar water. The design creates a screened "trough" that lets the bees feed on the sugar water without drowning in it.
Beekeepers use a feeder in at least two circumstances: First, when a colony is newly installed into a hive as a way to jumpstart the hive, until the bees find their nectar and pollen sources; and second, in the winter when the colony has consumed its food stores, the weather is still too cold for them to forage and the nectar flow hasn't yet started. There are definite advantages to using a top feeder as compared to other feeding systems. You don't have to open the hive and the bees don't have to go outside to feed.
Meanwhile, the queen excluder I added is a nifty sheet of plastic mesh, like a grate, on which the uniform slots are big enough for the worker bees to pass through but too small for the queen to pass through. Above the queen excluder is yet another super, empty except for the eight frames and their foundation comb.
In a text-book scenario, the worker bees should eventually fill this top super with honey. Nothing but honey! Who knows, maybe we’ll get a tiny harvest before the season ends. (Not that I know how to rob the hive...because, of course, I don't. But I'm up for some on-the-job training.)
I’ll keep you posted.
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