This is a brand new (and nearly perfect) frame of honey bee brood. Click on the picture for a closer look.
Not brood as in introspective and depressed – brood is the term for pre-adult honey bees. The queen lays an egg in a cell (up to 2000 a day) and 3 days later it hatches out into a larva – on day 8 the workers put a wax cap on it – where it meta morphs like a caterpillar into a butterfly. A few days later (depending on what caste the bee is destined for) an adult bee emerges.
I promise that this isn’t going to turn into a blog just about honey bees, but I think this is pretty cool and I thought some of you might be interested. Click on either picture in this article and you’ll get a high resolution version that you can zoom in on – hold the ctrl button and hit the + key to zoom in.
Look closely now - in the uncapped cells you can see white larva curled up in all stages of development. The white capped cells at the top of the frame contain honey - I think. The tan cappings lower down contain baby bees. The cells that look empty actually have either eggs or larvae that are too small to see. Right in the center of the picture you can see a bee with her head stuck down into a cell - she's feeding a baby. Click on the picture for a much higher definition view.
Is that cool or what?
If you’ve been following my progress as a bee keeper you can see from these pictures that the bees have stopped building crooked comb and are now building 2 frames of comb like this about every 3 days.
Amazing, little brother! I love these articles! So, are they going to quickly over populate your hives? And, if so, what then? (All I want for Christmas is honey!)
No, they won’t overpopulate any time soon. The life expectancy of an adult worker bee in the summer time is only about 60 days or so. They literally work their selves to death.
.
Also when there isn’t as much pollen and nectar available the birth rate will slow down and the hive population will reduce so that they won’t need so much honey to survive the winter.
.
Unless there’s an unusual bounty later this summer – which would be caused by really good weather and rain – I’m not planning to take any honey this year. I’m just hoping to have a strong healthy hive that will survive the winter.
.
The next Christmas if all goes well.
I’m totally loving reading about your honey bee escapades! Keep it up
I just discovered your entries about bees. I don’t think posts about bees are at all out of place on a gardening blog – pollination is obviously an essential part of gardening, and bees are the number one pollinators.
Really great photos. How the rest of the beekeeping season go?
Well, I got another hive by doing a trap out extraction of a colony that was inside of a concrete block wall. So I’m going into the winter with two hives. One of them is a bit on the small side, but the young queen was laying like mad in September so it has a lot of young bees, and I have high hopes that both colonies will make it through the winter – fingers crossed. I’ve really enjoyed my bees, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot in my first season. I hope to rear some queens and increase my apiary next year.
Hi- I really appreciate your clear photos and info about the honey bee. I am a new beekeeper and just inspected my new hives to see if the queen was laying/accepted. She was let out of the box about 1 week ago, there are plenty of bees/comb/honey, but I didn’t see any eggs or cappings. Just curious, how long did it take for you to see the cappings so you knew the queen was ok? thanks in advance and I hope the hives are prospering!
If there was comb for her to lay in you probably have brood right now, but until your eyes learn what to look for it can be hard to see. Eggs can be very hard to see on new white comb – especially through a veil. The nurse bees will also try to cover the brood and sometimes the queen. In another week you should see plenty of capped brood – look on the very first comb that was built. Try to relax, everything is probably fine. Let me know what you find in a week.