Here’s a look inside the hive as it is expanding!

You can see there are a lot more bees crowded onto the frames when we removed them, they were absolutely packed in the ‘busy’ areas where they were raising brood.

If you look closely, you can see a bee egg here – it is the little white jelly bean like thing at the bottom of the cell. It takes a bee egg about 3-4 days to hatch into a larva.

Here you can see bee larvae in various stages from egg up to larger size. It takes 21 days for a worker bee to go from egg to adult – when in the stage above they are fed by young bees taking care of the brood nest and then they get ‘capped’ (the cells that look puffy and closed) where they do their final development, pupating into adults.

The shiny cells are unripe honey (it gets capped when it is fully ripened – a process where the bees remove moisture so the honey can store indefinitely). The dark orange and multi-colored cells are stored pollen.

Here you can see the queen bee. She is considerably larger than the workers and has a much larger abdomen. Her entire job is laying eggs, up to 2500 a day at peak times. Her light color is part of her genetic history as an Italian bee – it has nothing to do with being a queen (queens can be striped, dark, light, or any color other bees are).

Not the bees, but a fun picture of the garlic in the garden that time in early June.  We grow a variety of heritage types!