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Here are a few of our hives during the middle of a nectar flow, busy girls.
A new worker bee. Workers are all girls and have different jobs in the hive and foraging at various stages in their life.
This is a Drone, a boy. He has a rounded butt, no stinger and large eyes. His only job is to mate. (in mid air, then his life is done) He is even fed by female worker bees.
This is the size difference of a drone, (middle left) compared to the other female worker bees
These workers are feeding the babees (larvae) curled up in the honeycomb cells
The Queen has a long fat abdomen(center near bottom) She mates with several drones on mating flights after she emerges from a cell. Then she has enough eggs and sperm stored for a few years of almost constant egg laying.
This is sealed brood, almost a solid pattern, This hive has a fantastic queen.
The brood on this frame is worker brood(flat topped) on the right, and drone brood(left) with the dome shaped tops. The queen lays a fertile egg for female workers and an unfertilized egg for the drones.
Look for the white dot in the bottom of the black cells, those are fresh laid eggs.
This is a nice fat marked queen. Sometimes she's hard to find among all the busy bees, so marking with a spot of bee safe paint makes her easier to find.
There's a queen on this frame, can you find her?
Find the queen here also!!
Bees are fun to watch, loaded down with pollen they sometimes make a tumble landing. The guards(one of the girls many jobs) make sure she belongs there and let her come in the entrance.
Purchased packages of bees come in a white mesh bee bus, with 3 # of workers, a can of sugar water feed and a caged queen
The caged queen, gets a lot of attention from her loyal subjects
Her you can see her nice fat abdomen.
hives can have very different characteristics. Some build nice perfect straight comb. This hive built a boomerang
When they can't build straight comb, we help them with a few rubberbands to hold it in place straight on the frames
One of the swarms that found our yard last summer
Another huge swarm in the same apple tree in our yard, 2020 was a crazy swarm year
A honeybee sipping nectar from an apple blossom
This is a little mason bee. We have a variety of other native pollinators in our yard
A HUGE bumble bee coming in for a landing
We have a few flow hives and Love tasting the different honey from whatever's blooming as the season progresses.