Nurse bees are usually about a week old (age after they emerge from their cells). Their job during this stage of their life is to feed larvae. For the first three days of a bee’s larvae stage, it is fed with royal jelly by nurse bees. Once a larvae is three days old, the nurse bees will feed it with a mixture of royal jelly, nectar, and pollen, until the cell is capped. In the pictures below, we can clearly see the difference in size of the worker and drone cells. We can see that when the nurse bee is attending a worker larva, she barely fits inside the cell. But when she is feeding a drone larva, she is almost completely inside the cell, since drone cells are much bigger and wider than worker cells.
Tag: bees
Busy bees
The Queen Cage
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.
Package Day
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!











The Importance of Honeybees
The sign in the picture below says:…..” Please do not disturb the honeybees. Their pollinating work ensures your food supply”.
That’s truth. Honeybees are a inestimable value as agents of cross-pollination, and so many plants are dependent of honeybees for their reproduction.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, workers honeybees pollinate 80 percent of our flowering crops which constitute 1/3 of everything we eat. Losing them will affect the production of strawberries, almonds, apples and many other plants like alfalfa, which will develop in threaten our beef and dairy industries.
Did you know that……?
- There are three types of bees in each colony: the queen bee, the worker bee and the drone.
- There is only one queen per hive?
- The queen and the worker bees are all female.
- The drones are all male.
- The practice of beekeeping dates back to the stone-age. There are several cave paintings that shows this activity.
- A queen bee can live for 3 to 5 years.