At the end of last year we became bee keepers... My husband and I had no experience but our son has been learning about bees for a few years at school. Since December (when we got the hive), they've now filled all the frames and are ready for their first super (a 2nd box placed on top for honey storage). It was great to see when we opened them up today that they were already ready!
This is a frame full of honey.
The first few frames were full of honey but then we started finding frames with the brood. The brood is the term given to "baby" bees more or less. The first brood frame had a bee starting to hatch. We've not seen this before so that that was pretty exciting! You can see it in the photo below, center of the photo. Look for the cell that is starting to open.
Hatching bee.
A frame with brood.
This is the best photo to show the different stages of the brood. The dark yellow/orange capped cells and this is the last stage in their development before they hatch. The ones pictured here are male drone bees. Then if you look inside some of the open cells you can see small "C" shape grubs, this is the larvae which is the 2nd stage of their development. You can see some larger sized larvae near some of the capped cells. Then there's all the open cells which look empty. They're not empty and will have tiny little eggs in them. The eggs are tiny (like a pin) and are quite difficult to see.
So it was really great to see all of this today and now that the super is on, we can start looking forward to lots of wonderful honey!!
great photos! its so nice to see the process broken down as well. ive only done beekeeping once and it was an incredible experience! would love to have my own setup one day :)
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Thanks @intinerantartist : )
Yes, I tried to keep it simple so everyone could understand. We're still learning and probably have a long way to go yet but it has been wonderful and rewarding. We're now just looking forward to the honey reward too! :D
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thats the best part!:)
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I hear once you really get going the honey can become a pain, lol, I can't imagine that myself!! :D
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That is a cool set up!
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Thank you, we were getting there : ) I was going to say slowly but really they're not slow at all. We're really interested to see how long it will be before we can start harvesting honey, if they can get enough done through Autumn before the Winter, we should be able to extract a couple of frames in the next couple of months. Really looking forward to that!! : )
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