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Beekeeping

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June Status

Checking the Hives and Feeding

For most of the month of June the bees just built up the population towards the middle of month one hive could put away a half gallon of sugar syrup in less than 24hrs. This was amazing. The pictures for June come from the earlier part of the month and show only two medium hive bodies on the hive. By the end of the month the bees had moved into three medium hive bodies.

Checking in on the Bees

Alright one of the first things to being a good beekeeper is to be able to tell if you have a queen in your hive or not. If you don't things are in trouble and you better get one fast. There are two main ways to find evidence of the queen; either find the queen yourself (see likes to run and hide), or to find eggs that she recently laid. Kendra is the queen spotting pro in this house. She can look for one bee while I am trying to avoid getting stung by the other 80,000. She found the queen early in June and that resulted in this picture below. Can you spot the queen? In addition notice the white capped cells in the upper right corner that is where the bees have capped sugar syrup (no honey yet). The light brown capped cells in the lower left of the picture is capped brood. These are future bees that have spun a cocoon and been capped by their sisters until they emerge in about a week.

Here is a picture of a full frame of bees. Noticed the capped sugar syrup in the upper corners and a full brood pattern in the center of the frame. This is a good sign that you have a good queen and she is laying right and not skipping many cells.

Okay second chance to find the queen. If you notice the open cells in the center of the picture those contain larva, if you look closely you can see little white larva in the open cells. Did you find the queen?


Last picture for June. This picture shows a couple of bees coming in for a landing. The bees had been coming in loaded down with pollen. That was what we were trying to get a picture of, but I think we just got bees landing.

 

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