July 2012 brought with it hot weather and the bees spent a lot of time outside of the hive, helping to cool it in the summer heat. This is a photo taken right before we added the third boxes to the top of the hives to give the expanding colony more space to grow.

I hand-detailed each of our boxes with a bee glyph!

Goldenrod was blooming all over the farm, which the bees were busily visiting!

Not a bee but a fascinating flower-mimic spider on one of our apple blossoms. Usually the trees wouldn’t be blooming this time of the year, but as they were newly planted out of dormancy I think they were a bit ‘confused’.

Guardian bees making sure no one gets into the hive that should not bee there. They were checking each bee as it came in with loads of pollen and nectar, touching them with their antenna before allowing access.

Pulling frames out of the hive, each was very busy and covered in bees.

A detail of the comb, showing the beautiful construction of the hexagonal cells as they are built.

Sometimes the bees build ‘bridges’ between the frames that have to be separated to inspect the frames.

If you look closely you can see tiny capsule shaped eggs just laid in each of the cells. In 21 days each of those will be an adult bee!

Here you can see more developed brood (the shiny curled round things in the cells). Caps cover older brood which is in the process of transitioning from larvae to adult bees.

Bees communicating by touch.

These larger brood chambers are for drones (male bees) which take longer to develop and are significantly larger than the worker bees.