Queen Killa

"That was major drama at the hive" I said. "I think that was you who was being majorly dramatic"   Matt said. "No! The bees were the ones being dramatic!" I dramatically responded. "The bees were just being bees" Matt calmly replied.

There WAS major drama at my hive because there were swarm cells all over the frames in my hive! Ahhhhh!  Swarming is a bee phenomenon that happens when half the bees leave the hive with the queen to look for a new home when they feel like they don't have enough space in their hive. This is the natural way bees create more colonies, so it's not that crazy; for the bees it's normal.

The reason we don't like it though is for a few reasons. One, I don't want my queen to leave. We live right in a neighborhood and we want our bees to be gentle, and not aggressive. The queen I have produces very gentle offspring and that is good, especially for the four neighbor kids who live right behind us. Another reason is that if half my hive leaves, then I have a much weaker hive. Less bees to do all the work means less honey, less foraging, slower everything. And if they don't have enough honey, and enough resources, they might not survive through the winter. So ultimately, if they swarm, I could loose my hive. That may happen anyway, but not if I can help it!

When I opened my hive for a hive inspection today, I found queen cells. There are three different kind of brood cells that a bee can make: worker bee cells, drone cells, and queen cells. They are bigger and longer. See there in the middle of the picture?

To prevent the bees from swarming, the queen cells must be scraped off. BUT I had to make sure my queen was still in the hive. Sometimes if the queen dies or leaves, the bees will make a new one. I had to make sure that was not what was happening. That was a whole other drama: finding the queen. After a few frames of searching, I found her. Whew! So I scraped off about seven or eight queen cells. I was sweating in my bee suit. It was kind of sad because they die. I'm such a queen killa! If Matt and I lived out in the country and our bees were not near as many people, we might not manage them as closely.

 You can really see the five queen cells here (below). There is queen larvae in the bottom of them but they are not capped yet. When I scraped them off, there was lots of, what I am assuming was, royal jelly which looked white and creamy. Queen bees are fed only royal jelly for their whole entire lives.

Queen larvae (on the right) that we pulled out of the cell. 

That was super hard core.

 See that gooey orange stuff? That is propolis. It is everywhere. The bees use propolis to fill in cracks and make the hive waterproof. It makes checking the hive very sticky business. Propolis has antibacterial properties and the bees also use it to keep their hive healthy.

Also, we saw some drones, male bees. They are bigger and have bigger eyes than the worker bee.

See him in the middle there?