Laboratory Bees - Moving Hives

_{By vizyweb on pixabay.com}

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Disclaimer: All pictures below have been taken by me, and all information stems from the university's beekeeper, which is why I won't provide online sources.

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Today, I was allowed to watch our beekeeper move bees from an old hive to a new one, so of course, I took plenty of pictures and asked just as many questions!
The bees shown in this post are mainly used to train new beekeepers and to teach students about beekeeping.

First, the fresh hive was prepared. As you can see, it consists of a wooden box that's stacked on a wooden square with a net as a floor.

Inside, the beekeeper placed a single wooden frame. There are different kinds of these frames, the one used here has no "building template", so the bees can decide freely what they want to build. At this time of the year, that will be combs for drones.

Frames with a template are used to guarantee that the bees either make honeycombs filled with honey or combs with developing worker bees.

Here's an example of a filled frame:

After the hive was assembled, it was time to grab this thing:

If you look closely, you can see smoke coming out of it. That smoke serves to move the bees away from areas where they might be squished during the move. A squished bee produces alarm pheromones, and the other bees will become aggressive and attack.

And that's not exactly the desired outcome.

Carefully, the top of the hive (and a sheet of plastic covering it to protect from water) is lifted off, and the smoke blown onto the bees.

And here you have it, the inside of the old hive!

The bees shown here were very calm, which is primarily due to their genetics. If you have a particularly aggressive swarm, the only thing you can do to make it less aggressive is to switch out the queen for one with less aggressive gene material.

The wax you can see here on the top are combs the bees built for drones. They're larger than the ones for workers, as the drones are larger.

Because the wax was on the outside of the wooden frames, the beekeeper had to scrape it off. Luckily, that gave me the opportunity to take a picture of a big, fat bee larva!

The old wooden frames were taken out one by one, and checked if they're still okay. After about a year, the wax turns dark brown and the frames should be switched out. But not all frames in the old hive were that old, and could be moved - together with the bees sitting on them.

Maybe you wonder how a beekeeper knows which honeycombs do in fact contain honey, and which contain larvae. To answer that, I want to show you the following picture.

Do you see the brown cabs covering the holes? They look a lot different from the honeycomb in the third picture. That's because eggs have been laid in there.

Here you can see two of the holes in the process of being closed:

Because the queen lays her eggs from the inside of the frame to the outside, the new bees hatch from the inside out too. That behavior gets you an interesting pattern of open and closed holes.

Speaking of the queen, I got a good look at her too of course!

The yellow dot has been added with a paint stick and is supposed to stay on the bee. In this particular case, the yellow color indicates that the queen has hatched in 2017.

Knowing how old the queen is is important to the beekeeper, especially because this way, a new queen can be easily spotted.

The large queen doesn't have a mark? In that case, the hive has disposed of the old queen and nurtured a new one.

The disposal of an old queen is not a nice process. Worker bees sting their queen to death and rip out her wings and legs.

A new queen develops from a larva fed with royal jelly. In the beginning, even worker bee larvae are fed with royal jelly, but only the future queens are fed with it during their whole development. They practically swim in it the whole time, while other larvae have to beg to be fed.

Until now, nobody really knows what epigenetic factors are triggered by the royal jelly, that cause a normal larva to develop into a queen.

If you like horror stories, I warmly recommend reading the short story "Royal Jelly" by Roald Dahl, which is all I can ever think of when somebody mentions this "food of the queens".

Edit: I totally forgot to add the picture with the bee eggs!

See the tiny white things that look a bit like miniature rice? That's bee eggs.

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