Sometime between the cooks and guard bees, the middle aged bees are called upon to make wax to repair cells and to build new cells. The older bees cannot make wax anymore and the newly hatched bees are not mature enough. I would guess that 2 to 4 days are spent at this job […]

The question was raised, “How long does it take house bees to graduate into Nursing?” The answer is : I don’t know. According to one source, the first 3 weeks are spent doing household chores. The last 3 weeks are spent in the field force foraging for pollen, nectar, and water. […]

The life of all honeybees starts as an egg, about the size of a comma “,” which is laid by the queen in the bottom of a wax cell in the brood area of a hive. A worker egg hatches after 3 days into a larva. Nurse bees feed it royal jelly at […]

When a new worker bee hatches from her cell, she gets a long drink of honey then, while her wings are drying, she will clean her cell and get it ready for another egg. Then she will join all the other new bees and older housekeepers and clean the hive. They will clean impurities […]

The queen’s only job is to lay eggs. From the time she is mated until the day she dies (up to 7 years), she is the sole propagator of the hive. Without her laying the eggs, the colony will die. During the Spring nectar flow, the workers only live about 6 weeks. About 2500 […]

I was asked the question, “What do bees do when it rains?” The answer is I really don’t know. But I can make an educated guess.
Bees are like any other small insect when it rains. They are about the same size of hard raindrops. If a drop of water hit a […]

Moving bees by the hive can be a backbreaking experience, especially if you are doing it by yourself. I know. I have been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. I finally broke down and bought a hive lifter (sometimes called Hive Carrier, or Two Man Hive Lifter/carrier). The […]

There is an article that suggests a virus coming from Australia is the cause for the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Seems that the pathogen, Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, is paralyzing the bees or at least weakening them to the point of death, that the bees are dying outside of the hive.
The bee packages, […]

I sometimes get called upon to go and talk/teach students about honey bees. This time I was to talk to the kindergarten class at a private school. Since I did not have an observation hive, I needed to take a video with me to show the little ones moving bees.
I got there at the […]