The sun peeked out this afternoon after a solid week of rain and we decided to open up the hive and see how the bees are adjusting to the move. By external observations I’m seeing the bees return with pollen, previously orange, I found this lady with white pollen. I wonder where she was playing?

Unfortunately, after smoking ourselves and then dawning the suit we attracted the attention of a couple neighbors walking by. The secret is now out. Hopefully this doesn’t cause any trouble down the line.

Opening the hive, I found the super to be virtually empty of bees, however they had done an excellent job uncapping some of the honey and draining the cells. Though there was still plenty to have. The top brood box was in a similar state. Empty of bees, with a little bit of action on the full honey frames. However, once I got to the bottom brood, where I had left the bees a week ago, my expectations were high.

… though I should pause here to think a bit.  Understanding that when I pulled the burr-comb out 12 days ago I halted ALL bee making business, as I removed all Brood from the hive. So any hive growth would have been, well, unnatural.. cosmic? spontaneous? I’m not sure why I was expecting such an explosion in population when I know that it takes 21 days to develop a bee. So when I found the box stagnant, my heart sank, but only momentarily until my rational, as discussed, kicked in. I then carefully evaluated each frame until I arrived at the bee covered frames. Arriving at the bees I slowed down and carefully examined each frame. Honey-flip-honey, replace. Then Brood-flip-brood, larvae, and…. eggs! she’s been here! (PHOTOS HERE)

Let me take a minute to remember the developmental cycle of the bee… Eggs are laid (the tiny grain like objects in the bottom of the photo), and are eggs for three days, then they develop into larvae and smothered in royal jelly (the white coils, mid-photo). They are larvae until 7-8 days. At that point the cells are capped and the bee develops into a pupae (brown cells at the top of the photo). Remembering that the oldest development could have only started 12 days ago, my oldest developed bee is in it’s ‘white-eyed’ stage and still has close to 10 days left in it’s development, which means the first bees to be born here are going to be Christmas Bees!

As you can see from the photo, we found the a good collection of brood, larvae, and eggs, which means the queen had been in the hive within the last three days… and that means she was most likely sitting on the frame of bees I was looking at. I examined closer and then POP! there she was (that was a figurative pop)

I gently replaced the ‘queen-frame’ and then slowly scooted the other frames over. Made some changes to center the brood frame in the hive and wrapped everything back up. I was pleased with the relative ease of the event and returned to sweeping the bricks.