As part of a raffle competition last Autumn Louis from P5 won a beekeeping lesson with his Dad.

We went out to see if we could find the new queen yesterday after she hatched on Tuesday.

We couldn’t find her, but we will give her another week to grow full size and check again.

We did however, see something amazing which was our other Queen “Beeyonce number 2” laying an egg. This is very rare to see – check out the video below!

Finally, our new Queen also has a name.

this was chosen as part of a whole school competition and the winner was chosen by Millie from P1

The new Queen’s name is MRS BEELAMY!

Today, we inspected the new hive and the queen is doing really well!

The queen is laying lots of new eggs and building up our new hive. The other bees are taking good care of her and making sure there is enough nectar and pollen to feed the babies.

We also added some more bees from the other hive to make sure that there is enough bees in the hive.

Our other hive was a bit grumpy because we have now stolen the queen!They had built 10 new queen cells for new queens. These all have young larva in them and they are 4 days old. They will be born in 12 days hopefully.

If you look closely at the picture, you can see the white milky substance in the cell. This is Royal Jelly and is one of the most nutritious foods in the world. The Queen bee is twice the size of the worker bee, but grows 5 days quicker. The Queen takes 16 days and the worker takes 21.

We will check back in another few days and choose the biggest queen cell and remove all the other ones. This means that there is no risk of swarming when the new queens are born.

We will be running a competition in the school next week to name the new Queen Bee – so get thinking about names!

Today we were able to split our one hive into two new hives. This is so that we can grow a new queen and have more bees in case we lose any more in the winter.

It should also help stop the hives from swarming this year and then we won’t lose honey production.

This is the original hive. This hive now has no queen as we stole her to put her in the new hive. This hive still has:

• almost all of the bees
• all of the honey they have made this year
• almost all of the baby bees, eggs and larva.
• no queen

This hive will now create it’s own queen. we will check back in a few days to see how they are getting on with this.

This is hive number 2. This hive has:

• the queen which we stole from hive number one
• one frame of pollen
• a couple of frames of honey for the bees to feed the babies on
• only young bees less than 3 weeks old because all the old bees fly back to the old hive.
• a feeder to feed them sugar syrup until the young bees start collecting their own nectar.

Check back in a week to see how hive 1 is getting on growing a new queen and how the queen in hive 2 is getting on starting a new colony.