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!