(Jeff was gone week four.)
The yellow ovals on the bees are pollen, collected from flowers.
The bees carry the pollen back to the hive in pollen baskets on their back legs.
The pollen is the bees' protein source of food.
This photo was from week three... notice that there are no pollen-filled baskets. That is because hardly any flowers were blooming during week three.
The cells on the left of the photo contain nectar. Nectar is the bees' carbohydrate food source. It is also gathered from flowers. Those cells will eventually be capped with wax, and the nectar will cure into honey.
The bees are building all the wax cells themselves, from sugar water we provide.
The honey in this part of the hive will be the bees' food in wintertime. We have not yet added the parts of the hive that will hold honey for us ("honey supers").
In week three, we said that the next time we checked the hive, we would make sure the queen was doing her job, which is to lay eggs and make new bees. From this photo, you can see that she is indeed hard at work! On the right, you can see the larvae (baby bees) which are being tended (cleaned and fed) by the workers.
These brood cells are capped when the larvae get ready to change into real bees.
In the very center of the photo, you can see a little, black "C" shape. That is a brand new adult bee, just ready to come out of her capped cell and start doing her work in the hive!
Welcome, new worker bee!
Here is a close-up of the larvae. You can see one bee bent down halfway into a brood cell, feeding a baby. Bees are very clean, keeping the babies tidy and also removing any waste from the hive. They also take out any bees which have gone to that big honey pot in the sky.
These brood cells are special. They contain drones, the only male bees in the hive.
Drones have no stingers, and they are larger than worker bees. Drones also have huge eyes and wings. These brood cells are larger to accommodate the larger drones.
Drones are cared for and fed by all the female worker bees, and laze about all summer. But in the fall, they are all kicked out of the hive, so that there will be enough food for the babies during the winter. Those drones do not survive. More drones are created again in the spring.
A drone's job is to mate with a queen so she can produce eggs. But our queen was already artificially insemenated, so she will produce eggs for the duration of her life (about four years). Therefore, these drones are useless. They are kept around as "an insurance policy" in case the queen dies.
If that were to happen, a baby worker bee will be fed royal jelly by the other workers so that she would grow up to be a queen. Then a drone would mate with her, so that she could continue to lay eggs and the hive will survive.
(Jeff was gone week four.)
