I visited the golden girls today and I can't believe it - there's almost an entire deep box full of mostly capped honey that will be ready for the taking within a couple of weeks. That's just about five gallons of honey already!
When I work in the hive, I remove all of the top boxes first, stacking them on top of one another perpendicularly. This gives me the chance to clean the burr comb from the top of the frames. The first frame I pulled out of the bottom box had her majesty on it! A couple frames over had the beginnings of a swarm cell.
Swarm cells are what honey bees create when they decide that they're going to raise new queens before half of them leave with the current queen. The worker bees use a fertilized egg that the current queen has laid and draw out the comb around the cell to fit a developing queen. Nurse bees feed this larva "royal jelly," a more protein-dense version of the concoction that they feed normal worker bees with a zest of a chemical secreted from the head of the nurse bee, and this dietary change transforms what would be a worker bee (with a six week lifespan) into a queen (with a five year lifespan). Voila! It's not until she successfully mates with over a dozen male bees that she has earned the title and the worker bees accept her as their queen.
So yes, I saw a swarm cell, meaning my honey bees are planning on leaving me. Where there is one swarm cell, there will be more.
When I work in the hive, I remove all of the top boxes first, stacking them on top of one another perpendicularly. This gives me the chance to clean the burr comb from the top of the frames. The first frame I pulled out of the bottom box had her majesty on it! A couple frames over had the beginnings of a swarm cell.
Swarm cells are what honey bees create when they decide that they're going to raise new queens before half of them leave with the current queen. The worker bees use a fertilized egg that the current queen has laid and draw out the comb around the cell to fit a developing queen. Nurse bees feed this larva "royal jelly," a more protein-dense version of the concoction that they feed normal worker bees with a zest of a chemical secreted from the head of the nurse bee, and this dietary change transforms what would be a worker bee (with a six week lifespan) into a queen (with a five year lifespan). Voila! It's not until she successfully mates with over a dozen male bees that she has earned the title and the worker bees accept her as their queen.
So yes, I saw a swarm cell, meaning my honey bees are planning on leaving me. Where there is one swarm cell, there will be more.
They leave me with no choice: I am going to split the hive. This will entail me attempting to trick the colony into thinking that it has already swarmed by separating the existing queen bee from all of the frames with swarm cells. This will result in two separate colonies if all goes as planned. It's a tricky situation and I have a lot of reading to do to make sure I get the proportions of capped and uncapped brood, worker bees of varying responsibilities, and food resources correct for each hive during a split. More to come on the art of hive-splitting!