It's the Bees' Knees!

We wanted to check on the progress of the honeybees that we placed in a box after catching a swarm.  Tricia put on the bee suit and I put on the veil and we went out to the box to inspect.  The bees, so far, have been very gentle.  We haven't needed to use the smoker to calm them down.  Once they have honey and lots of brood to protect, things might change.  

I want to show you some photos from our inspection of the hive.  You can see below that the bees are drawing out comb on the foundation.  Slowly, but surely, they are filling up the frame.

This next photo is very interesting as it shows several stages.  First, in many of the cells, you can see a tiny, white thing that looks like a grain of rice.  That's the egg that the queen has laid.  Right in the center of the photo, you can see three cells that have a big white "C-shaped" thing in it.  That's the larva.  Finally, you can see golden-colored capped cells.  The cells that are capped for between 8 and 14.5 days.  This is the pupal stage and at the end of this time, an adult honeybee will emerge.  Queens can lay approximately 1,500 eggs per day, so you can imagine the colony sized begins to increase quickly.  They'll all go to work filling the frames.  You don't want them to run out of space as they can swarm, so we added an additional box with frames on top to allow for growth.

Bees are SO busy.  You can understand why the term "busy as a bee" was coined.  I took a photo of a bee full of pollen as she flies into the box.

Here is a more close up photo.  Note the bright yellow pollen on the back legs of the bee.  She's been working hard to bring pollen back to the growing hive.  We know we have a laying queen as we've witnessed the eggs, larvae and capped brood, and we know the bees are bringing food into the hive.

As I slowly looked at the activity, I was looking for one other thing.

The queen.  Our colony is very small as it wasn't a large swarm.  If I'm going to ever spot the queen, it has to be now, before the growth is exponential.  I spotted her!  If you look at the bottom, right hand corner of the frame and work your way up to the left diagonally, she's the 3rd bee from the bottom.  Do you see her?

She has a longer abdomen (or tail) in comparison to the others.  It has a little red tinge to it.  She also has a more black and shiny dot on her thorax.  Now that I spotted her, I carefully put the frame back in the box and closed the top.

Long live the queen!  We'll let her get back to work.  The flow is about to start as the white dutch clover, privet and (soon) the Chinese tallow tree will be flowering.  We're not sure if we'll get to pull honey this year, but we'd certainly like to.  We're also trying to catch another swarm.  No success yet, but we've seen scout bees checking out the swarm trap.