I saw the queen in one of the hives run across the top of the frames and will be marking her next week with a blue numbered dot. This will tell me that she started laying in 2011 (each year has a different colour so that you know the age of the queen), and the number will allow me to start a family tree if we decide to breed from her.
I knew as soon as I opened the hives that the virgins had been successfully mated. The bees were delightfully quiet and industrious and barely conscious that I was in the hive. There was a calm, quiet and contented buzz which is indicative of a happy collective colony and a heralding of an assured existence. For those of you who can't imagine why anyone would want to be messing around with insects, this is a time of rebirth and natural succession unfolding in front of your eyes. There couldn't be a greater sense of satisfaction.
What appears to be empty cells in the middle of the frame, have eggs like a grain of rice in the middle of each one. When I visit the hive next week, that eggs would have changed into a larvae and the week after will be capped with wax and the week after that will have emerged as a new bee.
The wax capped cells in the middle of the frame have larvae pupating into bees in them. The flat ones are the workers and the lumpy ones raised from the surface are the drone males which are larger. Just above the queen and to the right, you can see exposed drone larvae that haven't developed enough yet to be capped, but are just about ready for that.
The open cells around the edge of the frame are shiny with nectar that the bees have brought back in their honey stomachs. The bees add enzymes to it and then fan to evaporate the water content and once it reaches the consistency of the honey we are familiar with, they cap it with beautiful white wax. They use this to make bee food for the larvae and mix it with pollen for a mix of carbohydrate and protein that is very healthy for developing bees.
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