July 2009 – The Healthy Honeybee

Expert Help

by Honey

A big thanks to Ken and Steve for coming out to my beeyard yesterday! Here you see Ken scraping the junk off a bottom board – something I hadn’t thought to do since getting my bees. Here’s what came off them: . You can see different kinds of pollen – the different colour pollen comes … Read more

Reno

by Honey

I’m pretty sure one or both of my hives will need a second brood box soon, which means I need to get them ready! This is the first coat of paint for these boxes. The reddish colour is my old hallway colour, and the blue is even older – it’s from our newlywed apartment. 9 … Read more

Bees with Balls

by Honey

It looks like my queens have decided to grow some drones. See the capped cells that bulge out? Those will be male bees. The queen makes the decision to lay a male or female, usually based on the diameter of the cell. Once she’s made her decision, she makes it happen by either fertilizing the … Read more

Look Out World

by Honey

Here she comes! Can you see the worker bee chewing her way out of the cell that she pupated in? Right near the middle of the picture. This is her first job as a fully developed bee. She is 21 days old, and full grown. She started as an egg, fertilized and laid by the … Read more

Elusive

by Honey

Every time I open my hives, I am on the lookout for my queens. It’s a good idea to know where they are, so they are not accidentally misplaced or incapacitated. However, for some reason the queen in my second hive seems to see me coming and vanish. I haven’t seen her since I installed … Read more

Marked

by Honey

Can you find the queen? She’s a bit hidden, but you can tell which one she is. Here’s a better picture:

What the Heck?

by Honey

To my Dear Bees: Why would you build comb and fill it with honey in the squishy little space between the top of the frames and the inner cover, when you have more than two empty frames yet to fill in your hive?

Friends

by Honey

Some of the ladies came to visit me as I was watching the swarm settle into their new home. They hung around for a bit, let me take some pictures, then flew off to see what was going on with everybody else. Very docile. We thought the bees might be on edge, given the cloudy … Read more

A New Home

by Honey

Continuing the saga of the swarm: it didn’t take long – about a few minutes – for the bees to head down into the hive box between the frames. They’re exploring the possibility of this new place, probably walking all around the box to measure it and figure out if it will work for them … Read more

Beautiful Bees

by Honey

I’m so glad I was able to go see the swarm yesterday. There’s something wildly different about seeing bees up close without the familiar constraints of the hive box. Wow are they gorgeous. A solid mass of bees, hanging from a branch. They didn’t mind me poking around with my camera, inches away from their … Read more