The Queen Has Arrived!

We spotted the queen within 3 minutes of opening the hive. It was a quick game of Where's Waldo! The queen is the bee with the black shiny thorax and wings folded over her abdomen.

 I am excited to say we have a queen! We spotted our lady within a few minutes of opening the hive on the third frame we looked at. She looks healthy and she had lots of attentive workers. I am not sure if she has mated yet as we did not see any brood. We looked for new eggs and only found pollen and nectar. The hive was very clean and I think they are ready for her to start laying. Once we get some full frames of brood, we are still going to do a hive split.

We entered the hive on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 at 11:15 am. The weather was about 70 degrees and sunny.

We will inspect the hive for eggs on Saturday (weather permitting) and every 3 days or so until we find it. They we will mark and clip the queen so we can easily find her in future inspections.

This one cell full of bright orange pollen was such a beautiful sight.

There were still lots of bees in the hive despite having a look with all of the foragers out.

The comb is clean with no brood at all, but there are cells of pollen and nectar scattered throughout.

The Bee Visit...

My little visitor!

I had a very exciting experience with my bees this morning. It is about 54 degrees, windy and cloudy. I went and sat on the edge of my garden bed with my cup of coffee to observe the hive and I look down and this bee landed on my leg. Now I am all dressed in black with a dark fuzzy sweater and black scarf on, so I though I was going to get stung. But as I sat there and watched this worker do her business, I soon realized she did not want to fight, she just needed to regroup and rest. So I began videoing the experience. She first emptied her pollen baskets then began cleaning herself and making little pollen balls. You could see the yellow pollen all over my pants.

She sat on my knee for over 10 minutes and just groomed herself. It was awesome to see something like this, and video most of her visit.

I was just looking through the videos and Sebastian comes up to me and says, "Oooo, what movie is this?!" He sat and watched all of the movies. I think he is just as fascinated by all this as I am.

Visit from a bee from Autumn Anglin on Vimeo.