Category: All About Bees

Usually when you open a hive the queen’s egg laying is interrupted. However with this queen she just kept on laying while the hive was out in the open.

When the hive gets hot during the summer you can expect to see a large number of bees outside the hive clustered and hanging off the entrance. This is totally normal and the bees will soon go back inside once the hive is cooler.

It would seem that moving a hive should be an easy task. However moving a hive just a few feet can completely disorient all the foraging worker bees. So if we are to move a hive the rule is that you can move a hive up to 2 feet. Anything over that distance then you must move then 2 miles away. Moving them over 2 miles away triggers them to reorient to their hive and not get lost.

In this example I moved a hive about 1 foot and turn the hive 90 degrees from the original orientation. Before I moved the hive, there was normal entrance activity with much fewer bees in the air. After I moved the hive there are hundreds of bees in the air trying to find the new entrance location to the hive. They will soon learn the new entrance location.

Introducing a new queen to a hive can be an easy task but it can also go horribly wrong. First, the hive must be without a queen. Typically for about 24 hours would be best to go without a queen. Any longer and they will start making a new queen. Any less and they may not yet have a hive consensus that they are queenless.

There is a chance that the hive will reject the queen and kill her. In this example, the bees take to her very quickly and are not showing any signs of aggression to the new queen. The queen can be introduced immediately if the hive is not showing signs of aggression. However it is best to wait a 3 day period for her pheromones to saturate the hive.

Nectar is the second resource which bees require for survival. Nectar is the essential carbohydrate source which bees use to fuel all their activity and reproduction. Nectar which is later transformed into honey is what the bees use to survive the long winter months and periods of dearth.

In early spring the bee colonies are coming out of a period of dormancy and are looking for new sources of pollen and nectar. Early spring is a risky time for bee colonies as they are increasing their daily caloric requirements but do not yet have a nectar flow to harvest. Dandelions are the first sign of a nectar flow in the Denver area and bees are quick to harvest the resource.

Maybe we should think twice before removing this valuable source of nectar. We should most certainly stop using herbicides to destroy these nectar sources.

Pollen is one of two different resources which bees require for survival. The pollen is the raw protein source which bees need to build new baby bees. In early spring pollen begins to come into the hive at an astonishing rate. The bees spent the entire winter surviving inside the hive living off of the nectar stores. Now that spring has arrived the bees despretly need more nectar and pollen to start the colony baby bee production back up.

Once a new queen has emerged in the colony she is not yet ready to lay eggs. The queen must take a mating flight and mate with several drones. The queen will then return to the hive and begin to ley eggs. The process of mating flights and subsequent ovary development can take approximately 13 days. Several things like weather can interfere with the mating flights. Also a queen may take several test flights before the actual mating flight.

Once a queen is mated and her ovaries are developed, she begins to produce pheromones. The other worker bees are extremely keyed into this pheromone. You can see a huge difference in the attention that the worker bees are giving to these two different queens. One queen has been mated and her ovaries are developed while the other is not.

A couple of weeks have passed and the new queen has emerged. She is not yet mated but is out and about inside the hive. She will remove any other unhatched queens and will soon be mated. Once she is mated the queen will then be able to lay eggs and the colony will continue.

Making a new colony is a very fun activity in the Spring. If left alone to their own actions, Honey Bee colonies will perform this action every spring in an attempt to make a genetic copy of their successful genes. When the bees do this on their own we call this behavior a “Swarm”. When beekeepers trigger this behavior manually, we call this a “Split”.

As a beekeeper we would rather perform a split manually and satisfy the honey bee’s instinctive desire to swarm. During a swarm, the beekeeper will loose over half of the colony to the swarm and may never see those bees again. In a swarm the original queen takes over half the hive out to find a new home somewhere far away. A beekeeper can prevent this behavior by performing splits.

A split is simply the act of opening up a hive and taking out 2-3 frames of brood and leaving behind the queen with the mother colony. Taking out frames of bee brood will slow the mother colony down and make them less likely to swarm.

The new split has tons of workers and brood at different stages of development. The worker bees will choose a larva at the correct stage of development and begin turning that larva into a queen. Thereby, in about 25 days, this new colony will have a mated queen ready to start laying eggs. The video below is following the worker bees create a queen cell and raise a new queen.