Honey Store Photos

If you have entered our honey store you would know that it is also full of information and photos from our hives. Below are photos and information about various parts of bees and beekeeping.

Burr comb is created outside the frames, often filling up free space.

You can see here that the bees filled the space between their lid and the top of their frames with burr comb and honey.

This is a well laid frame of brood. The brood is the darker patch near the center of the frame. Brood is where the honeybee eggs are and where baby bees will eventually hatch from. Along the outside the whiter area is capped honey.

Queens can be tough to spot. Remember that she is generally a bit bigger than regular bees with a longer back end.

There she is with the crown on!

This frame has eggs and the developing larvae that will eventually be covered and will hatch with baby bees. The pollen is collected to feed both the larvae and bees as it is a good protein source for them.

This is the start of a queen graft. Meaning that it is used to raise queen bees. A grafting tool is used to carefully grab a larvae.

The larvae that was collected is then put into a queen cup where the rest of the hive will get to work creating the queen's cell.

Each of these cells holds a queen that can be used to help a failing hive or create new hives.

Queen cells are very sensitive to temperature and can be damaged when being moved from place to place. This carriage is able to regulate the temperature and provides padding to keep the queens safe until they are off to their next home.

The queen cell is gently placed into the hive and given time to hatch. Later workers will check to make sure she successfully emerged.

Up in that tree, near our honey yard is a suspicious clump.

That clump is made of bees and called a swarm. Often swarms are caused by overcrowding in the hive and the old queen takes off with some of her hive to find a new home. If caught early the swarm can be caught and put into brood box.

During the summer our yards are used to make honey.

Honey supers are stacked high during the summer. The brood stays below with the queen where workers are moving upwards filling the supers with honey. These look to be five boxes high and they may be switched out a few times during the summer.

This is uncapped honey. Meaning it is liquid in this state. Once the bees have determined that it is no longer to moist they will create a cap of thin wax to cover each of the cells.