Skip to main content

Her Royal Highness

Today, during inspection, I was able to lay my eyes on each queen. Although it is never my goal to see the queen during an inspection, but rather evidence of her existence, I was pleased with each sighting. Luckily, I had my phone readily available, and I was able to make snapshots of each queen.

Leia
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
Notice the capped brood in picture above? That's the brownish colored capped cells. Also, there is open brood which can be easily seen (eggs and larvae).

Below, is a photo of Chewbacca. She is moving around on a frame with capped brood (upper left corner of photo) and with food (pollen and nectar). She is a bit nestled in among the workers but we can easily recognize her by the large black plate on her upper thorax. What a beauty!

Chewbacca
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
Adriana is quite large compared to the other queens. I wonder if she will be able to reign for four or five years. An very impressive specimen, indeed!

 
Adriana
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham
All three queens have brood of all stages and hopefully Leia's colony will begin to pick up a bit more speed. We also observed a couple of bees hatching! It is amazing stuff.

I also weighed each hive today, just to 1.) test out the scale and 2.) see how much food was in each hive. Before the hives were occupied, I weighed each part of the hive separately so I would know what the empty weight would be for any given configuration. The hives in their current configuration (hive floor, one brood box, and one inner cover with felt mat) weigh 10 kg. A single bee weighs 0.1 grams. I roughly guessed that each hive has about 7000 bees including brood. That means the weight of the hives without counting food ca. 10.7 kg

Here are the results:

Adriana : 16kg (net food ca. 5.3 kg)
Chewbacca: 16kg (net food ca. 5.3 kg)
Leia: 14kg (net food ca. 3.3 kg)

The amount of food is not sufficient for winter stores. I hope the bees start to pick up momentum. I may have to start feeding them on a regular basis sooner than I thought. I will ask my mentor how much the hives should weigh and then I will feed them accordingly.

Katie, looking for eggs
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham

"Lots of eggs and brood, Dad!"
Copyright 2015 Jason Hotham

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Swarm season

This time of the year, the bees are really starting to bust out of the seams of their hives. Stronger colonies are in full swing, while weaker colonies are trying to build up their numbers to at least become stronger by seasons end. Curiously enough, both situations can also spark swarm behavior for both types of colonies,especially in Carniolans (Apis mellifera carnica). Carniolans have a higher tendency to swarm than, say, Italians or Buckfasts, so of course keeping Carniolans can be a bit tricky and nerve wracking. A few words about swarming. The act of swarming is a natural occurrence, and is necessary for the propagation of honey bees. Since the queen mates only once in her lifetime and each colony only has once queen at any given time, the ability to procreate depends on building a colony to a sizable amount and then by splitting the colony in two. Honey bees, of course, have a brilliant way of doing this. The first thing that needs to happen before a colony can swarm is they n...
Post a Comment
Read more

Boosting a weaker nuc

Leia's colony is not as strong as the other two, so I acted on a tip from my beek mentor. He suggested I place a frame of capped brood from one of the stronger nucs into the weaker nuc. The reasoning behind it is that the weaker bees will get a slew of new bees within a few days that will help in strengthening the colony. It is important however, that all the bees that are sitting on the frame be brushed off before the move. Otherwise, we would end up with a lot of dead bees. I was a bit nervous to do this for two reasons. 1.) When you brush bees off a frame, they fly around in a cloud for a few minutes before they settle down and try to re-enter the hive. Since I generally do not work with a veil, I was worried some might get caught in my hair and sting me. 2.) I was afraid I might hurt the queen. Well, no bees got caught in my hair, in fact most of the bees that I knocked off / brushed off fell immediately into the hive, while the others flew directly to the bee house window....
Post a Comment
Read more

Brood behavior

Honeybees know when to increase and decrease the amount of brood in the hive. Many factors contribute to this behavior; some natural, some man-made. The art of beekeeping often revolves around identifying and properly diagnosing problems. This past week, I was also faced with an interesting situation: a brood free colony. Now, as a beginner, it is sometimes difficult for me to understand what is really happening with the bees I tend after. Often times, during an inspection , I will see something and just say, "hmmm, that's interesting" without giving much of a second thought. Well, as I noticed that one of the colonies was free of brood, I mean completely barren of any signs of brood, I started thinking, "hmmm, this isnt so good" and I began to worry. A colony without brood cant survive very long. After all, the bees need to have a steady flow of new bees to keep up with the attrition. So now I was faced with a situation I hadn't observed before and I need...
Post a Comment
Read more