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.
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.
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.
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