Author name: James

This is pretty much all day every day lately. They’re pulling in goldenrod nectar and pollen which, unfortunately, makes the hive smell a bit like sweaty socks. It doesn’t have the usual nice smell of honey and beeswax at the moment. But apparently that’s normal and once the nectar becomes honey, it will taste perfectly […]

So, last week, we had some dead bees out on the landing board of the hive. What was odd was that they were not fully grown bees. It seems as though the nurse bees pulled still-growing bees out of their cells and out of the hive. I asked around the beekeeping community, and there were

I think there’s a heavy nectar flow somewhere that just bloomed. The bees are in and out like crazy. Usually there are a couple dozen hanging around the landing board. Not this morning. Other than a few guards, everyone is either taking off or bringing in resources – nectar and pollen mostly, though bees will

Christina got this video of one bee kicking out another bee. Not exactly sure what the reason is. Could be she was drunk/had fermented nectar (they don’t tolerate that), or that she was from another colony and wasn’t welcome (fear of robbing resources), or they felt she was in some other way damaged and unwanted.

Here’s your honey bee lesson for the day. This is something honey bees do and no one really knows why. It’s called “wash boarding”. The adolescent bees rock back and forth near the entrance of the hive. They don’t seem to be cleaning, guarding, socializing or anything else. Just rocking back and forth. I don’t

Well, it was time to open the hive again and see what was going on. The first thing we noticed was this: For one, that’s a lot of bees on the inside over. Secondly, they’re building comb on the cover. This might mean they’re running out of room and looking for places to build comb.

Looks like our colony has hit a population boom just in time for the fall nectar flow. Tons of bees out, some guarding, some gathering. The top box is now very heavy to lift as they’re filling it with honey for the winter. They’re also bringing in tons of pollen which you might be able

Just a constant stream all heading off west. They must have found something good to forage on out that way. Not seeing a ton of pollen, but what is coming in is almost white. Don’t know enough about flowers to know which has white pollen and is in bloom now.

Our hive has hatched a lot of new bees lately! This is cool for a few reasons. The first is that it means that they’re thriving. If they have enough resources to lay eggs, then they’re not starving for food. The second is that we get to see a lot more activity. Here’s some slow-motion

Christina managed to capture a bee coming out of it’s brood cell, so we thought we might share that. Enjoy! For those who are curious, a worker bee takes about 21 days to go from an egg to coming out of the cell, ready to work. Drones (the males) take 24 days and queens take