Pollen and Larva: Part II

Worker with Alfalfa pollen in her pollen baskets.

So we're going to revist a couple of older topics with some good pictures, and then there's a new and fun topic at the end, but no skipping ahead!  Hive number 2 is still doing very well. The workers have drawn some comb in the upper hive body, and the queen has made her way up and laid eggs there as well.  The foragers were out in force today, even though we've been lacking rain for over a week now and it's getting very dry.  They were bringing in the same pollen as they were before (which I believe was Pear), and they are now bringing in another kind, which, thanks to the handy Pollen Source chart, I believe is from Alfalfa.

Worker with Pear Pollen in her pollen baskets.

While these are certainly not the only kinds of pollen they are collecting, it definitely doesn't surprise me that they are bringing in a lot of alfalfa, considering how many fields around here are full of it.  I still haven't been able to decide where the pear trees are, but they seem to have found it.  Additionally, I've seen lots of bees up in our yard on the white ball clover, and tonight I saw one in the garden, buzzing around looking for something flowering.  Unfortunately, that's a losing battle in our garden right now.



As we work our way over to hive #1, we get to revisit another old topic, but with some fantastic pictures as we look at the stages of development for the eggs and larva of bees. 

This picture gives a good view of the shared space between brood and pollen.  The pollen is kept near the brood to be convenient for feeding the developing young.  These nurse bees are working their way around tending to the young.  I was unable to get a picture of them sticking their heads down into the cells with the young and tending to them, because they work their way through pretty darn quickly.  When there's 1500-2000 new eggs a day, there is a lot of running around to do in order to make sure that all of the young are tended.  The picture below gives a blown up image of the various stages of young, numbered from 1 (youngest) to 5(oldest).

As you can see, the first circle is a tiny egg that looks like a miniature grain of rice.  It stays this way for the first 2-3 days, while it is growing into number two, a tiny little larva.  From there, the next 6-7 days grow it into a larger larva (numbers 3-4), and finally into one that fills almost the entire cell (number 5).  Around day nine, worker bees will cap the larva where it will stay for the next 8-12 days, when it will emerge as a worker ready to help the hive.

Our final picture covers one of my favorite facets of colony life: the guard bees.  At the entrance to the hive are many guard bees, who inspect every critter attempting to gain access to the hive.  Whether it is another bee or something else, from a spider to a mouse to a skunk, or anything else.  Obviously, with anything other than a bee, it's a pretty easy job.  The guards see a spider coming in and release their alarm pheremones, alerting the colony to the danger and mobilizing them to fight off the threat.  This is why the first thing one does when preparing to open the hive is smoke the entrance.  This masks the pheremones of the guard bees.  With other bees, however the guard bees check the pheremones.  If the bee belongs to the hive, it may come in and do whatever it needs to do.  If the bee belongs to another hive (and this is my favorite part), the guards will either mobilize the hive with their pheremones, or accept a bribe, if one is in the offing.  Bees from other colonies will sometimes offer a bribe of pollen to the guards, at which point they can come in, grab some honey, and leave again.  The picture below shows a guard bee (far right) checking the pheremones of a returning forager before allowing her into the hive, while another bee is coming in right behind her.  This guard bee inspected dozens of bees while I watched, a very quick process of face-to-face interaction, moving efficently on to the next bee as quickly as possible.

It's a girl! And...Another Girl. And another, and another...

I want to preface this post with my sincerest apologies.  I know that the pictures are probably the best part about this blog (what that says for my writing, I don't know), but I inspected last time on my own, and going solo makes taking pictures difficult.  I then have to hold the frame, the camera, and sweep bees out of the way of the proposed picture by myself.  Sadly, being equipped with only two hands, I'm not very adept at doing this all by myself, so the pictures aren't up to the normal standards of the blog.

Here you can see a lot of empty cells(the darker ones are all empty) surrounded by lots of (the lighter colored) capped cells.  Those empty cells were all capped and full just days ago, but we've gotten (with one hive) around to the hatching stage, where new bees are constantly breaking their way free of their birthing cells and joining the productivity of the hive. 

This picture shows two very blurry bees making their way out of their cells.  They're tough to see, but since they are doing this continually, I will get some better pictures next time I get Erin to come out with me and inspect.  For now, the bees are hatching like crazy and the population is exploding. 

Hive two is progressing rather well, and has been given a second hive body with frames to fill up.  As of yesterday, Hive one still hadn't released their new queen, so I helped them along, and she is hopefully laying eggs by now.  I'll give her a few more days to get established before I go bothering them.  Thanks for reading, and I'll "bee" back with you as soon as there is anything new.

Death of the Monarch

Well, it's not all sunshine and honey in a beehive.  Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen, and in our "Hive 1", we lost our queen.  It's not uncommon for bees to supercede their old queen during the first year, likely because they have recently settled down from the stress of being packaged and shipped across the country, and are replacing the queen because they feel she is responsible.  Anyways, when Erin and I went to the hives the other day, we discovered 6-8 queen cells on a couple of different frames.

These elongated, almost peanut shaped cells contain new queens.  If this wasn't the first year, and I hadn't gotten such a late start on the hives this spring, I would let them do their own thing, and raise their own new queen.  However, since these queens are anywhere from 16-20 days away from laying eggs, we're not going to wait. I've ordered a new queen who will be here tomorrow, at which point we will destroy all of the queen cells in that hive and install a new queen.  Within 3 days or so, she will be released to the hive and start laying eggs.  This will help to lessen the lag time between new bees being hatched, and hopefully help this hive to be able to survive the winter.

It is unfortunate to lose the queen, and have to requeen so early in the game, however, we'll keep on pushing, and get these girls settled.

Look at the Babies!

I went out today to just do a quick inspection and get the girls some food for the weekend, as we're off to Ohio tomorrow morning for five days to see some friends and take a little vacation.  I was desperately trying to figure out how to keep them fed from today until Sunday, and I had an inspiration when walking through Tractor Supply Co. the other day.  I picked up a couple of gallon water pails for chickens.

The challenge with getting the girls fed all weekend is that they can't use anything in an open bucket or similar, because they get into it and drown.  This has just a small ring around the outside that fills with syrup.  I filled the ring with rocks, and that will give them something to land on and crawl around on as they search for their delicious syrup.  Hopefully, there won't be too many drowned bees when I come back.

All of these little grub looking things in the cells are bee larvae.  They started out as those little grains of rice we saw in the last post I made, and here they are just a few days later growing up very quickly.  In the center of this picture, you can see a bee with her head deep down in a cell.  This is a nurse bee tending to the young, feeding them nectar and small amounts of royal jelly (early in their growth cycle).  Nurse bee is one of the first jobs that bees get after they have hatched and are ready to start working for the hive, and their job is solely to care for the developing eggs, larvae, and pupae.

Over to the left, you can see the waxy covering that has been placed over the larvae (called "Capped Brood" at this stage.)  They will remain like this for another 11-12 days, before brand new bees will emerge.  This is especially important right now, as no new bees have been born sine the bees were packaged to ship, and the size of my colonies have been slowly diminishing over the last couple of weeks.  Soon, however, I'll have a whole new crop of bees, and it should be just in time for them to start gathering from the field crops that are peeking through, and our garden which should start poking shoots out in another week or so.

Pollen!

Erin and I went out to inspect the hives, and had a great time in the hives.  As soon as we got there this morning, we noticed the bees coming back in with bunches of pollen stuck to their legs. 

It took a little while to get a good close up picture of a couple of the girls with pollen, but it was worth it.  Every few seconds another one or two would land, full of pollen, and scurry inside the hive to drop it off.  After doing some searching online, we've decided that this pollen looks closest to pear pollen, using a pollen source chart hosted at Wikipedia.  The inside of the hive had lots of these girls waiting to offload their pollen so they could get back out foraging again.  Just like them, we were headed inside the hive.  After a few puffs of smoke, and a little work, we got into the good stuff on the frames.

On this frame, all of those dark spots are the pollen that is being deposited by the bees.  This is one of the frames closer to the center of the brood chamber, so it's a little farther along than most of the others.  The yellowish cells are full of sugar syrup or nectar (I'm not 100% sure which.)  Most of the rest of the cells (that are still white) contain eggs that will soon become larvae, and a few weeks after that will hatch into new worker bees.  Look at the picture below.  Most of those cells contain eggs (I've pointed out a few for you) that look like small grains of rice.  While it looks like the queen is hard at work, she has the potential to lay between 1500-2000 eggs in a single day, so this was a walk in the park for her.                                                                            

We were also able to see some capped honey on a few of the other frames, as you can see below.

The small bit of waxy covering on the cells near the center of the picture is the beginnings of wax capping.  The wax covers up the honey, sugar syrup, etc. until the bees need to use it, at which point they will open it back up to eat.  Speaking of eating, the last picture below was taken on our hive tool.  Erin had been using it to scrape off some of the burr and bridge comb the bees had built while we had the queen cage in the hive.  Afterwards, it had some sugar syrup/nectar/honey on it, and our good little worker bees weren't going to let it go to waste.  See her tongue sticking down to lap up the syrup?  It's not a probiscus like you see on mosquitos, that's all tongue!