Building Up! April 22, 2010

Queen is slightly off center. In the background of the honeycomb, you can see larvae.

The bees have been very busy!   It has been 4 weeks since I caught my first swarm and installed it into a hive in my front yard.  After only two days, the bees had begun drawing comb.   Six days after installation of the swarm, I found eggs and was assured that a queen was present.  Eggs hatch in 1-3 days.  After that, the small larvae lay in their cells, curved in a small C-shape, and the adult workers feed them royal jelly, pollen, nectar, and honey.  All larvae receive royal jelly for about 3 days and then are switched to other food for another three days.

Several Larvae in their cells.

Here are a few cells with eggs (click on image to see a magnified view).

At that point (6 days post hatching), the larvae have grown significantly and begin to pupate.   At this point the cells are capped, and the pupae develop for several days until they emerge as fully developed adult bees.  The entire process (hatching from egg to emerging as an adult) takes 16 days for a queen, 21 days for a worker, and 24 days for a drone.  So after 4 weeks, I am expecting an increase in activity around the hive as new adults begin to emerge and add to the work force in the colony.

Pupa in her cell. This cell will be capped soon.

While I was checking the hive, I did indeed find evidence of newly cleaned out cells, indicating that brood had emerged and that workers had cleaned out all remaining nectar/debris from the cell so that it would be ready the queen to lay another egg.   In fact, I also saw a few capped cells that were showing signs of activity as the encapsulated adult worker was beginning to eat her way out. One worker had managed to get most of her cap out of the way and was peeking out at the world.  There are still plenty of capped brood and plenty of larvae and a few new eggs, indicating that the queen is still doing her job as well.  It is exciting to see the colony building up their numbers to take advantage of the nectar in the neighborhood!

Evidence of a Queen April 1, 2010

This black bee is not from my hive and many like it are frequenting my rosemary bush. Although, it is only slightly larger than a honey bee, it has been identified as a bumble bee.

The swarm hive has been in place for a week now.  I had to go in and check to see if I could find the queen.  It was early evening and warm, so I decided to go for it, even though this is not typically the best time of day to bother the bees.

Clear evidence that this was a small swarm is that these bees are still only occupying about half of the frames in the hive body.  They are busy drawing comb in these four frames, and I saw plenty of collected nectar and some pollen stores.  But my mission was to locate the queen.

After examining all four frames, I returned to the third frame from the western side of the hive.  The comb is the deepest on this frame, so I thought this was the most likely place to find any eggs that might have been laid.  I was momentarily distracted though…a relatively small cluster of bees was hanging around at the bottom corner of the frame, apart from the larger cluster covering the top half of the frame.

As I observed this smaller cluster, I saw a bee that looked significantly longer than the others.  Could it be the queen?  She moved around a bit and I could see that she did indeed look longer to me.  While I feel a bit insecure about identifying the queen, I think this was her!

Encouraged, I returned my focus to the upper half of the frame.  The bees were not terribly cooperative about allowing me to look into the cells of their honeycomb, so I blew on them gently, which seems to encourage them to scatter a bit.  I saw something slightly different, examined it more closely, and was pleased to see several cells of comb that contained one egg each.  This is a happy sight!  Eggs in the hive means a laying queen is in residence, and that I should start to see new adult workers in about three weeks.

Contrary to popular belief, workers can lay eggs; however, it is usually easy to tell when they are laying instead of the queen.  Workers tend to lay multiple eggs in a cell and to lay haphazardly.  A healthy queen will lay one egg per cell, right in the middle of the bottom of the cell.  The egg is oblong, less than 1 mm wide and about 3 mm long.  Sorry, I didn’t get a picture, but maybe when I get more adept at handling the hive frames I’ll be able to take my camera out, too.