Our bee hive is doing really well.
The queen has been laying lots of eggs and there are now thousands of bees in the hive.
The hot weather has also meant that they are making honey for us!
We are going to split the hive into 2 next week and grow a new queen. This is the perfect time of year to do this because there are drone (male bees) around.
We wanted to increase the number of drones in our hive, so we put in a shorter frame to the bottom box. This left a space which the bees filled with wax, but they built boy bee wax (the cells are bigger).
The queen has now laid eggs in this and in 24 days, they will hatch.
In this picture below, you can see the larva, which means it is between 4 and 9 days old. The bigger the larva, the older it is.
Check back next week to see how the splitting into two hives goes!
Hi, I’m looking at getting my own hive, I saw you have a top bar hive, I quite like the look of them and am led to believe their more natural and let the bees do their own thing. What do you think? I think your blog is great and informative, so hopefully you’ll help me make the right choice 🙂
Hello,
These are national hives with the bee space at the bottom bar. We find that these are extremely good for the bees and our bees are very happy in them. We seem to have very calm bees generally. I would recommend buying individual parts for hives from one of the big beekeeping websites (thornes or maisemore) and building your own hive. It’s extremely simple and youtube has great tutorials.
Thanks for the compliment.