Priscilla and Gwenevere: ...finding the Queens

On Sunday, we had our first bee class! There are 12 beekeepers in the class and 1 master beekeeper who leads the class. Marcus is the master beekeeper. The class is set up so that we all go through each individual hive. As we went through the hives on Sunday, we realized how important this was to our learning experience. All the hives were totally different. The goal of the day was to make sure the queen survived the hiving process and that she was active in the hive. These were the things we were looking for: the queen, brood (eggs or larvae), pollen and sugar water storage and retrieval of the queen box. Any of these things individually or in combination will inform us if the queen is alive and well. So here is a rundown of the day:

1. Rachel almost lights her car on fire. We lit our smokers for the first time. Our vague instructions were to put pine needles in the smoker and light it. What we learned: Pine needles are really flammable and don't light the smoker in your trunk. I'm very sorry that I didn't have my camera out when the smoker was sitting in Rachel's car.

2. The first beekeeper's hive didn't accept the queen. The colony decided to supercede (dethrone) her. Here's is how we discovered this: Her queen had obviously made it through the hiving process and she began to lay eggs because there were several capped cells (I will show you a picture of this later), but there were also queen cells. A queen cell is a capped cell that holds an egg that the workers have decided to raise as a queen. The egg is fed royal jelly by the workers and therefore becomes a queen bee capable of laying eggs. The queen cell looks very different from the other capped cells.

3. The remaining hives all had queens. The queens were able to escape out of their original box. Eight of the hives had queens who had already laid eggs. Some of the eggs had developed into larvae. Some of the larvae had been capped meaning they were ready to go through the pupa stage of development. One of the hives had no visible eggs or larvae. Marcus said that the eggs are very small when just laid so we might have missed them. We were able to locate the queen in this hive, and there was plenty of pollen indicating that the workers were making food for brood. The white in the bottom right corner of this frame is stored sugar water. The dark yellow closer to the center of the frame is stored pollen. The whitish/yellow area in the middle of the frame is capped cells.

In the picture above, you see a hole in the comb. The bees sometimes chew a hole through the comb to create easy access to the frame on either side. Marcus calls this the raceway.

4. Rachel found Queen Gwenevere!