A Box Full of Honey

Pamela, beekeeper buddy from work, came and helped look at the hives today. ABK (usual assistant bee keeper) provided educational narrative to the young children watching from the back porch across the yard. Here's the update on the girls. Rachel, as previously observed, is busting at the seams. The second hive body is full of comb, bees and honey. I added a shallow super (a shorter box with frames) to the top for them to make more comb and more honey. We'll give them a few days to start drawing out comb and then put a queen excluder between the top deep and the shallow to keep the queen out of that top box so that she doesn't lay eggs there, which will keep that shallow super full of nothing but pure honey. You can tell that Rachel is now a taller hive than Sylvia.

We delved deeply into Sylvia, taking out each of the frames in the bottom deep to see what was going on. Still no production in the top deep.

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Sylvia seems quite lacking a queen. There was no brood (no eggs, no larva, no capped brood). Just frame after frame filled with nothing but nectar and honey. So...they've got food, but no mama and no babies.

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We did find queens in the making...peanut shaped protrusions from the comb called supercedure cells. When a queen dies or otherwise disappears, the worker bees will pick some very young larva that would otherwise become worker bees, and they will begin feeding those larva royal jelly. The royal jelly leads the bee to become a larger queen bee. When the queen bee hatches out of her very special cell, she will make a mating flight with the drones and begin a career of laying eggs.

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So...if I leave this hive alone, odds are that one of these queen cells will hatch into a queen and all will be well. The first queen will kill any other queens that hatch out.

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I could also order a queen and add it to the hive, which I plan to research some this next day or so.

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The lack of brood was not happy, but the queen cells and the box full of honey give me hope.

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No pictures inside Sylvia today...but you can find pictures of queen cells in books and through internet links.