La Casa Grande Colectiva

Tag: hive

  • Losing a Queen

    Honeybees are prone to swarming.  A swarm is a big cloud of bees that have left the hive looking for a new home.  This is a natural part of their reproductive behavior, however in a back yard environment designed to maximize honey output, swarms pose a problem.

    A couple weeks ago Robbie opened up both hives and noticed that in one there was no sign of a laying queen.  Where there should have been cells filled with larvae at different stages of development there were instead empty cells.  This indicates that either the queen died, or she took off with a swarm.
    frame with no brood

    In this next photo you can see the slightly larger drone cells (where the male bees are hatched) and the very large queen cells that are perpendicular to the rest of the comb.  This frame is in bad shape, and all signs indicate that bees had switched to reproductive mode.
    messed up comb

    Without a queen constantly hatching new workers, the hive would simply work itself to death and that would be the end of things.  There were however many thousands of worker bees left in the hive, busy collecting what was left of the summer nectar flow.  The solution to losing a queen is to simply get a new one.  So Robbie contacted local bee expert, David, at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms and went to pick up a new queen.  The new queen only cost about $20, and would save us the trouble of starting a new hive in the spring.
    queen in a carrierYou can see her long abdomen through the screen with the little green dot to make her easy to spot.  The little cage that she came is designed to help her assimilate with the bees already in the hive.  Her potent pheromones waft through the screen controlling the army of workers.  The bees then chew their way through a sugar plug (black tube thing) and release her into the hive.  The delay while they work to set her free insures that she won’t just fly away once released.
    Re-queening the hive

    Robbie installed the queen cage between the two big boxes, right in the middle of the brood chamber.  In a week or two we’ll open the hive back up and see if there’s any signs of egg laying.  Until then, fingers crossed.

    You’ll notice how the hive on the left is much taller.  When Robbie noticed the absence of a queen, he moved the top honey super over. He placed newspaper between to act as a temporary barrier while the bees in there got used to their new master.  Oh the intrigue of beekeeping…

  • Late Spring Bee Checkup

    Ed, a local beekeeper, came to check out our hives for a three week checkup last weekend. Robby is out of town, so he arranged to have some members of CEIBA help keep an eye on the hives. We had gotten a late start with our bees but each queen came with 5 frames of brood and honey. In just a few weeks, the bees have really established themselves and Ed determined it was time to add the second box on the hive. This will give each hive 10 fresh frames to build comb and expand the colony size.

    Capped Brood

    This frame is full of capped brood.  Brood is the general name for combs that have eggs and larvae.  The worker bees feed the developing larvae before sealing them in with a cap .  In a few weeks these bees will hatch and the process will start over again with the queen coming around and laying eggs in each comb.  In this way, the colony will double and triple in size very rapidly.

    Bee emerging

    In the center of this photo, a bee is hatching from the comb.  We watched as the bee ate away the cap.  Like eating corn on the cob, she went back and forth chewing her way out.  After she leaves, the workers will clean out the comb and get it ready for another egg.

    Honey Combs

    This is what the comb looks like when the bees decide to store honey instead of brood.  This looks like it was a fresh frame to begin with since you can still see in the lower left that the comb hasn’t been fully drawn out by the bees.  There must be a lot of nectar flowing now because even though the comb isn’t finished, the bees are already storing and capping honey.  In the upper right is capped honey.  To process the honey, the bees sit over the comb and fan their wings to evaporate off the water.  Once the honey is sufficiently concentrated they seal the comb off.  You can tell the difference between capped honey and capped brood by the color.

    I took lots of photos so we could inspect the bees in depth without keeping the hive open for too long.  Click the thumbnails to go to a flickr set of the event.

    more bee pics