Look at my bees! They seem to be doing well and were not very disturbed by me opening the far end of the hive.
The yellow thing is the cage the queen came in, but the string it’s attached to was already built into a comb when I wanted to take it out.
@auressea - this is a top bar hive, the bees built their combs hanging from bars that are also the roof of the hove (although it’s also covered with a board to make it weatherproof). The bars can be removed with the combs attached and the bees are free to build all through the hive, I don’t have to add any more bars. If they use all the bars, they can build around 30 combs.
OK. I know I’m overly invested - but I want to know more! I am now vicariously bee-keeping- will you show us a picture of the hive from the outside too? I must have missed some posts about where/when you got your new bees?
I ordered a swarm online. Normally and in good conditions, bees swarm every year unless the beekeeper prevents it by destroying the cells where the new queens grow and you can get natural swarms from beekeepers who don’t do this. But I wanted to make sure I got a swarm and wanted to have it at a certain time, so I ordered an artificial swarm - it’s part of an existing colony and you get a new queen that has to be introduced to the swarm. A natural swarm already has a queen.
Things apparently went well, from the look of it. The colony has brood and are busy making honey. If the queen had not been accepted, one of the workers would start producing brood, but those would hatch only as drones, male bees, and eventually the colony would collapse. Drone brood cells look different from worker brood, though, the caps on the cells are bigger, and I’m reasonably sure that my colony has worker brood.
Here’s the hive:
You can’t see the bars here, they’re covered by the weatherproofed board on top. The white stuff is styrofoam that I use to cover the areas at the two ends of the hive where the bees don’t built. In winter, those spaces will be filled with straw for insulation and back when the colony got started, I offered food to the bees there (the food is similar to fondant, just sugar and very little water). If you would look into the hive from above, there are two spaces on either side, then two movable dividing walls that mark the space where the colony lives and between those walls, the hive is covered with the bars for the bees to build on. The underside is protected by a plastic and metal mesh to prevent wasps and mice and such to get into the hive, but otherwise it’s open for ventilation.
I won’t harvest honey this year, although the colony seems to produce enough for me to at least harvest a comb or so. But I rather wait until next year to make sure the colony is strong and healthy.
