This year, the whole family volunteered once again to help sell honey for the association at the Spokane Fair. During that wonderful Saturday afternoon, we answered questions at the IEBA stand to an always curious crowd of people, sharing with them some of our own experiences as a “beekeeper family”.
Supersedure cells are build during the process by which bees raise a new queen.
The workers will flood some cells where a larva has just emerged , with royal jelly. The worker bees then build a larger queen cell from the normal sized worker cell and it pop out vertically from the face of the brood comb.
Bees decide to raise a new queen for different reasons, some of them are:
When a new queen is available, the workers will kill the reigning queen by “balling” her which means that they clustered tightly around her until she dies from overheating.
This is how a Varroa mite (aka Varroa destructor) looks like when your hive is infected with it. By clicking on the photo, it will enlarge.
The Varroa mite can only reproduce in a honey bee colony.
The mite enters a honey bee (mostly drone) brood cell and as soon as the cell is capped, the mite lays eggs on the larva. The young mites hatch in about the same time as the bee develops and leave the cell with the bee and spread to other bees and larvae.
The mites suck the hemolymph of the adult honey bees, leaving open wounds and then the bees are more prone to infections.
This insect is one of many native pollinators, the famous bumblebee. It is more popularly known than other pollinators because of its “cute and fluffy” appearance.
Native pollinators are very useful in native areas for pollinating flowers that grow in their local area. They may pollinate any flower in their flight path, only pollinate certain kinds, or have a prefered flower. For example, leafcutter bees pollinate mostly alfalfa, and honey bees may pollinate it but don’t like to.
Native pollinators are quite different from each other in many ways. They vary in size, shape, color, and even speed. On top of that, different areas have different native pollinators, which gives them their name.
This is the Queen cage.
The queen goes in a Queen Cage either when you buy a bee package or when you buy a queen to requeen your hive.
The queen goes in it and is safe from any outside dangers.
If it were in a bee package, the bees would want to kill her because that queen isn’t from their hive.
There will be some attendant bees with the queen to help her while shipping.
Queen cells are peanut-shaped cells made by honey bees only for a queen bee to emerge out of. These cells do not end up sealed in a hexagonal fashion like that of workers and drones.
Instead, a queen lays an ordinary worker egg in a queen cup if intentionally breeding a queen or an ordinary worker cell. Then, workers will continually feed large amounts of royal jelly – this is what makes the queen develop reproductive organs and a larger abdomen than workers.
Three days after this egg has been laid, it goes into the larvae stage. After five days of feeding, the workers seal the cell and the larvae spins a cocoon around its body. In the cocoon, it turns into a pupae. It will stay in this stage for eight days, during which it develops hair, eyes, wings, and legs.
The word “Encaustic” means “to burn in” and the technique consists in painting with beeswax mixed with pigments and fixed with heat after its application.
This technique is one of the world’s oldest art forms and was first practiced by Greeks 500 years B.C.
I started painting with beeswax in 2010 and from the first day on, I could not stop making all kind of greeting cards and paintings of different sizes.
Below are some examples of my encaustic paintings. If you like to have more information, please click here.
WHY ?
There are basically two reasons for which you would like to mark your queens:
The queen is marked with a dot of paint on her thorax (the part of the body between the head and the abdomen), and to be able to mark the queen, you will need to use a device that will help you in this task.
There are different varieties of queen marking paints in the market. We bought some time ago a pack of 5 pen type markers and these are the ones we use every year.
Below is the International Color Code you can follow to mark your queens
The mark should be small, in this way will not cover any other part of the queen body.
Many times, the queen that comes in a package comes already marked. But this is not always in this way. If you are a new beekeeper and bought an unmarked queen we can help you a little by showing the way we do this task.
We hope the images are helpful for you :)
HOW ?
First step is to “catch the queen”. For that, you can use a helpful tool called “queen catcher”, it’s a
small plastic tool that opens when you squeeze the handle. Once the catcher is totally open put it over the queen and very carefully close it.
Second step is to introduce the queen in another tool called “tube marking”. It is a clear tube with a plastic mesh in the end. The tube is were you will literally (and again, carefully) drop the queen in.
Once you have the queen inside the tube, is time to use the “plunger” which is a little stick with a sponge in the end. Slowly you will start “pushing” the queen with the sponge until she is barely touching the plastic mesh. Be careful in this step and don’t squeeze so hard.
Now you have the queen in the correct position. You have her thorax on the top and she can’t move at all, but don’t worry, these tools are specially design for this task, so, if you work with care, the queen will not be hurt at all.
It’s time now to finally mark the queen. For this just need to use the pen with the correct color for the present year, and make a dot in her thorax.
Wait a few seconds to allow the ink to dry completely and then you can release the queen in the hive again. While you wait for the ink to dry, you can take a look and verifying that she is doing OK.
To release the queen inside the hive, we just open the tube and lye it on top of the hive, you will see the queen walking to the end of the tube and quickly she will go inside her hive.
And now the queen is “on duty” again ! Now you will always (or almost always) see you queen while she is working in the frames and…….bad for her…….you will know exactly how old she is :)
There are three different “castes” inside a bee hive:
If you look close in your hive, you will notice that the queen is almost always surrounded by workers, this is because the queen is totally incapable of take care of herself, so these “royal attendants” are surrounding the queen, feeding her and defending her .
It’s the time of year again, when you check your hives after winter and you realize that you may be need some new packages for your bee yard or……. if you are a new beekeeper you will need a bee package to start your first beehive.
If the latter is your case, maybe you are wondering what a “package day” is all about.
Well, we can help you here showing a few pictures of our experience in this matter. By clicking in each image, it will enlarge.
We hope that they illustrate well and give you an idea of how to start.
Enjoy!
