Follow The Progress of a Honey Bee Swarm Colony
Nick Smythe-a new beekeeper and I inspected the swarm nuc this morning. In our colony, the queen is a very productive and in danger of overcrowding so we migrated the “girls” from a nuc box to a 10-frame hive body.
Several photos below as we moved the five frames and adding five additional to the larger hive body. Several hundreds of bees had to be “dumped” from the nuc box.
One photo in particular of interest: in the last post was evidence of eggs. If you look closely, those eggs have hatched into larvae; similar to little white grub worms.
The larvae are fed by young nurse bees. Initially, all the larvae are fed royal jelly for three days, and after this they are fed bee bread, which is a mixture of honey and pollen.
Larvae have one simple tasks in life. Eat, eat, and eat some more to grow as rapidly as possible. A larva doubles in size up to 1,500 times during the six days of development. A larva molts five times, growing substantially in size after each molt.
After about 6 days, these cell with larvae are covered with a layer of wax by the worker bees, which we refer to as capped brood.
Nick wore his suit, I forgot my veil so we smoked them regularly and worked quickly!!!!!