Ain't MisBeehavin'

Well, our bees are certainly earning their keep... at least the Mellow Yellows are. Team Tangerine has some catching up to do! We checked the hives this afternoon, peeking into the top box first, and we were very happy with what we saw.

TT is creating comb on the top box, and there are some cells with larvae. They have gone through their protein pad and their juice jug was empty, and we decided to leave them that way for a while. There are so many plants in bloom that they will not go hungry. They seem to have taken a shine to the burning bush, which is in bloom right now. We wouldn't have known it was in bloom (because the flowers are very nondescript) if it hadn't been for the bees gathered around it. The trees out front are just starting to bloom now, and those will keep the bees more than well fed. TT had an increased population of bees, and new ones are doing the dance outside the hive daily, but we don't need to add another box to their stack yet, and we didn't open their doorway more.

As always, the Mellow Yellows were next, and wow! They have comb and are laying a lot of babies in most of the frames in their second box, and in the lid as well. There were a LOT of new bees... enough that we had to smoke them a bit more to calm them, and enough to make us give them a bigger door to go in and out. We were so surprised by the progress made in the top box that we just had to open it up and see what was happening in the box below. The comb down there is darker, and gets even more so with each brood of babies they hatch out. They are busy filling out that comb with honey... LOTS of honey. (Now comes the fun of keeping the wasps and hornets away, and man, do we have those again this year.) Mellow Yellow's amazing progress probably means they will be getting a new box again by next weekend, and will be three boxes tall with a medium depth one for honey on top. The experienced apiarists in the area tell us that peak honey flow usually happens around the summer solstice, so we are just in time.

We will also be starting three new hives this week. Finally, we will be receiving our first 'nucs'. It took a long time for the bees to be ready to breed because of the very cool and wet May weather, but we will finally have some local home-grown bees of our own. They get handled differently (at least as far as introducing them to the hive goes) so this will be yet another new experience for us.

We also have another bee suit, so if you're interested in seeing what we're doing, you're welcome to suit up and have some fun. This way, you get a front row seat for all the action. While we were working with the girls today, we had another guest show up -- a rhinoceros beetle, which isn't supposed to be here in June, but we weren't complaining.

We'll include some pics of the honey cells, the frames loaded with pollen, and one that has a really amazing picture of the bees' tongues -- yeah, they have tongues! Who knew?  

We Couldn't Beelieve it!

Day 15. Time to check our little buddies, and they did not disappoint.

We did Team Tangerine first. The hive has 8 frames in it currently, and a frame feeder -- a box that holds syrup for the bees to eat when the plants aren't blooming yet. It was wonderful to see that they had comb built in the first four frames. There were cells of pollen, cells that were capped for syrup, cells that had eggs, some with larvae and some that were capped with the larvae inside so they could finish growing. It takes 21 days from the time the egg is laid until a noo-bee comes out of the cell. We will be having a LOT of noobs soon.

The Mellow Yellows have always been the more precocious of the hives. They were livelier and hungrier, and they are still a bit ahead of the Tangerines. They are up to five frames of comb now, and they had created a burr comb at the top. That was our fault -- we had put the inside cover on upside down last time, so we created a space. Bees in a hive believe, apparently, that space is not to be wasted. They had gone through most of their syrup and their protein pad.

We wanted to take pictures of the bees, but some of us are still not brave enough to work right there with the bees without suiting up (yes, that would be me) but with the marvel of new age photography (not really, it's been around for a while but to my parents it would have been new age) we were able to get some pretty incredible pictures of the bees. Considering that they were all taken from at least 10 feet away, we are not going to complain about the quality. This frame on the left is from the second hive (Mellow Yellows) and was the third frame in from the feeder, so this one was pretty much smack in the middle of the box. It has a bit of everything going on.

 This is a close-up of it. You can see the larvae at different sizes, the bees tending them, some capping the cells, some adding food for the babies to grow. There are some here you can see with eggs in them as well. We had one frame where there were dozens of new eggs.

To explain a little, the bees create the wax comb. Other bees bring in pollen from the plants and it is stored around the area where the eggs will be laid. This is so that the food is handy for the bees tending the babies. There are some cells that are capped white. Those are full of syrup that is being stored. We're hoping they are doing that because of the cooler weather we've had. The queen will lay an egg in a cell that has some royal jelly in it. They other bees will tend the egg until the larvae stage, then cap the larvae. When it becomes a bee, it will emerge from the comb and start work.

We'll leave them to work for another week. They are surrounded by plum and apricot trees that are coming into bloom. The magnolias and forsythias are blooming as well, and we have daffodils, hyacinth, and tulips everywhere, so they should be happy bees for a while. We'll know better next week, when we see if the larvae have grown into real bees.