This morning, I was delighted to spend time with Primary 6/7 teaching them about the life cycle of bees and all the different jobs that they perform in their life.

Primary 6/7 have been writing reports so they were taking notes as I was teaching them which they will be turning into a detailed report on bees tomorrow.

The notes had to be short, succinct and efficient so that they could record as much information as possible in a short period of time.

After school we checked the hives and removed all but one of the queen cells. We now know which one will be our new queen and she will be born on Saturday or Sunday! Start thinking of names!

The new hive is doing really well, the Queen is laying eggs and is really happy.

Also look out for the bit where Mr Green gets stung!

On Thursday, Mrs Watson and Mr McMullan inspected the new hive to check if the queen was still there and if she had started laying eggs.

She has laid a full side of a frame of eggs and some of the nurse bees have become worker bees out foraging for food.

In the original hive, they are busy building a new queen. They know the old queen has left and they have built about 10 new queen cells. We will keep the one which is long straight and fat!

Today we performed an artificial swarm and split our hive into two.

Our hive is thriving and has been making preparations to swarm (see previous blogs on queen cells).

We took the queen and put her in a new hive with a frame of brood (eggs, larva and pupa). We also shook in lots of bees from the old hive. Some of these will be nurse bees, who look after and feed the babies, and some will be workers who go out and look for nectar and pollen.

The nurse bees will stay in this hive as they don’t leave, however, when the workers leave, they will go back to the old hive because they have orientated to the sun previously. This will leave us with the queen and nurse bees in the new hive, but only a tiny amount of brood. She will therefore think she has swarmed and start laying eggs like crazy to set up a new hive.

In the old hive there are 7 queen cells with larva that were born on the 11th or 12th of May. when they are 8 days old, the bees will cap over the cell and the larva will turn into a pupa. 8 days after that, the queens will hatch. This will therefore be on the 25th or 26th of May. We will destroy all but one queen cell so that we don’t get another swarm when the queens emerge. Then this queen will become our new queen.

Watch the video to see how we did it all.

During our inspection today we found two queen cells! At least one of them had an egg in it, but we couldn’t see into the other one.

We destroyed the two cells and will see if the bees make some more in the next few days. We will probably perform an artificial swarm later in the week to create two hives.

If you look closely inside the cell you can see a white grain of rice – this is an egg. In 3 days this hatches into a larva. The bees will build this cell bigger and bigger to create a queen cell and they will feed the larva a diet of royal jelly. If we left this queen cell alone, the bees would probably swarm in 8-10 days and we would only have half of our bees. Then after 16 days from now the new queen would emerge and be in charge of the hive.

Here is a frame of eggs and larva. The queen is working really hard to lay eggs so we have as many bees as possible to forage for nectar and pollen.

The bees are really going now and we have got some great stores of honey at the moment. Still no signs of a swarm so we are going to leave them for another week or two before we make them swarm.

Here is a detailed video which shows you how the inside of the hive works and how to inspect the whole hive.

Here also is a video of a swarm being captured

Our hive is growing in size every few days. All the eggs that the queen has been laying for the last few months have been hatching and as a result the number of bees is increasing by 1,000-2,000 every day. This will continue for another 4-6 weeks and then the hive will reach it’s maximum size.

Here you can see a frame from the super which is full of honey. The honey hasn’t been fully dried yet, so it hasn’t been capped over. The bees will take the honey and put it on their tongue, then they will fan it with their wings to dry it out. Once the water percentage is less than 10%, they will cover it with wax and we can take it from them!

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!

Today Mrs Watson and Mr McMullan inspected the bees for the first time this year.

In the top box there was eggs, larva and brood and lots of honey that they haven’t eaten over the winter.

Beeyonce was in the bottom box, so we put what is called a “Queen Excluder” in between the top and bottom box so that she can’t get up into the top box. This means that there will be no eggs laid in the top box and the bees will just use this for making honey.

You can see her searching around all the cells trying to find one that has been cleaned out and is ready for her to lay eggs in.

Here you can see the bees returning from foraging at flowers and they have got loads and loads of pollen in their pollen baskets on their legs.

The bees have woken up!!!!

Now that the milder weather of spring is here and there are some flowers – we found 6 different types on a walk this week – the bees are no longer clustering and are out looking for pollen and nectar.

This is a dangerous time for the bees however – there aren’t a huge numbers of flowers around and the bees need food because they are moving more which uses more energy.

The Queen is starting to lay eggs as well, and these babies need pollen and nectar to grow.

It is very important that we make sure that they have enough food to keep them going until more flowers are out and there is a steady flow of nectar.

They still  have stores of honey and I have given them more fondant icing to keep them happy.