Bees & Pollinators

What’s All the Buzzing About?

August 16, 2011

I’ve had my first sting!  Yep, I’m 34 and have never been stung by a bee before!  Maybe it’s my name???

Oh well!  It was an accident.  I was harvesting some tomatoes, squatted down and didn’t realize that a little bee had landed on my calf.  As I went down, so did his stinger, straight into my calf.  Poor little bee.  Well, at least now I know for sure that keeping bees won’t kill me (you know, that whole possibility of anaphylactic shock thing…).

Anyhow, we haven’t been bothering the bees much.  We’re trying to let them do their bee thing, but we decided to check them out last weekend after letting them be for the past 3 weeks.  What did we find???

New combs and lots of nectar…

Capped honey…

Lots and lots of larvae!  That explains all the newbies and their orientation flights!  Keep ’em coming!

Perfect comb.  These guys really know what they’re doing!

And the treat of an almost-heart-shaped new comb!  YAY!!!

We also found a cell with the larvae of a new queen.  How did we (ie: Tool Lady) know?  The cell almost looked like a peanut.  It protruded from the comb much more than any of the other cells.  And the larvae inside?  HUGE!  Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of it…we were too busy trying to get it open to kill it!  Our bees are too young for a new queen and we happen to like our current one!  Our bees are very calm, which means our queen is, too.  We’d like to keep it that way.
Based on what we saw today, we are thinking that we just might actually be able to harvest a smidge of honey before the weather turns!  I can hardly wait!!!
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