Here you can see stores of pollen, lots of larvae, both big and small and lots of drone brood which is baby boy bees.

The bees make drones at this time of year because they are getting ready to swarm. They stick out more because the boy bees are bigger. They also take longer to grow than girl bees.

The bees are doing very very well.

They are growing in number very quickly now that there is lots of plants to provide nectar and pollen.

Beeyonce can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day and the bees take 21 days to hatch so after 21 days you get up to 2,000 new bees every day!

That’s 14,000 a week and 60,000 in a month if she is really good at laying eggs!

This is the time when the bees will prepare to swarm so we are checking them really regularly to find out signs of swarming.

One sign that they are getting ready to swarm is the bees building “queen cells” which is a long cell where they grow a new queen. This is so that half of the bees leave with the old queen and half of them stay with a new one.

Bees are just like humans however and they practice, practice, practice building these queen cells – this is called a “Queen cup” and is smaller than a queen cell.

Below you can see our bees are building some queen cups to practice – its the bigger piece of wax in the middle.

Whenever they start building bigger ones and the queen is laying eggs in it, then we need to stop them swarming!