This week in the hives…
Late July is generally a dearth here in the northeast. There’s not a lot of nectar and pollen to be had, and it’s hot and dry. We only check on the hives about every 2 weeks during the dearth so that we disturb them as little as possible. Bees can be extra defensive when there’s not a lot for them to forage on. We did check on them this past weekend, it was a nice day, and the bees were pretty docile (we always use smoke to distract any guard bees). Check out this beautiful brood pattern from one of our hives! The bottom 2 boxes of the hive are “brood.” That’s where the queen lays eggs and makes more bees. The pattern should look sort of “rainbow” like… The very top and corners is capped honey, surrounded in an arc by pollen (these will be fed to the eggs, larva and emerging bees). that middle area arc is the brood. Capped brood is covered pupa that will emerge into bees, and if you zoom in, the uncapped areas have larva in them in various stages. When we open a hive to check on its health, we’re not necessarily looking for the queen… Mid-summer a healthy hive can have 60,000-80,000 bees in it… We’re not looking for one bee!! What we are looking for is evidence of the queen, and here we saw eggs and <4 day old larvae, so we know she’s in there somewhere! Time to close that hive back up and move on to the next one!
