Spring Splits

We have been busy with life and our bees the past few weeks and I realized I haven’t posted on my blog in a while (shame on me).  We had been preparing and building up our hives for splits and swarm prevention and everything went well. All the splits are doing great and we prevented swarming.

Getting some of our equipment ready.

Grabbing a frame with plenty of brood.

Grabbing a frame full of pollen, which serves as food for the brood.

Going through the hives looking for good frames to use in the splits.

More hives, more frames.

Providing additional nutrition with bee patties.

Finally, new nucs ready to go.

 

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How to Identify Elements on a Bee Frame

I thought it would be helpful for some of the beginners out there to see a frame with some important elements pointed out. I’m also providing a link to the full resolution versions so that you can zoom in.

Frame with important elements marked.

Click here for full resolution file of marked up frame.

Unmarked frame for comparison.

Click here for full resolution file of unmarked frame.

Well fed bees

Two weeks ago we added a second floor to our strong hives and they are doing very well. Here is a frame we pulled from the top chamber.  You can tell right away that these are well fed bees.  The brood (baby bees) are clustered together and capped in the center. Very nice laying pattern, meaning the queen is good.  Lots of capped and uncapped honey surrounding the brood, meaning they have plenty of food for the adults and to feed the larvae.

Bee Eggs

For those of you wondering what bee eggs look like, here you go.  They look like super tiny grains of rice.  This is new comb our bees built and the queen laid eggs in it already.

After she lays her eggs, the worker bees will take care of the larvae and cap the cells.  That is then what we call capped brood.  Here is a nice example of newly capped brood.