Bee Club, Burr Comb and Queen

We went to our first bee club meeting this week. Someone from the Washington State University Snohomish County Extension Program came to talk about bee diseases and to show us how to dissect the bees and to check for these diseases under a microscope. For one of the diseases, tracheal mites, you have to pull the head off the dead bee and find a certain part of her trachea. Crazy!! I hate tracheal mites, horrible. I didn't try to dissect, but I watched and learned. Needless to say, it was an informative bee club meeting. I also had fun people watching. I'm pretty sure Santa was at the meeting.

We checked the bees on Saturday and gave them more sugar syrup. Matt's bees were so busy that they built comb between the feeder and the frame. Matt scraped it off, it was filled with nectar/sugar syrup. Sticky! Matt moved some of the frames to encourage them to draw out more comb. Come on bees, make comb on the empty frames please!

There is a lot of capped brood too! 

My hive is doing well. I have lots of capped brood as well,

and it looks artsy where the bees have deposited pollen. 

AAAND, we saw the queen! She is marked with a white dot so she is easier to find. Can you see her? She is longer and more uniformly colored than the other bees with a white dot on her back. She was moving very fast. I think she was mad because she was interrupted and it was so bright. Matt's queen is not marked so we have not found her yet, but we know she is there because there are a lot of recently laid eggs! We are getting ready for lots of new bees to hatch.