New Queens

We’re pleased to report that we have new queens in the colonies we divided four weeks ago. These young queens will have been reared by the worker bees following being split away from the “mother” colony. The new queens will have emerged a week or two ago. In some colonies we have already found that the she is laying eggs so will have been out on her mating flight.

I caught a photo of one of our new queens, which is nice because it shows the new (as yet unmarked) queen, and also a worker and a drone.

You can see that the queen is longer and has bigger sections to her abdomen and no stripes.

The worker has a much shorter but striped abdomen.

The drone (male) on the other hand is all round much larger, wider and darker than the workers. And they have huge eyes that meet at the top of their head.

Honey

We’re very pleased to see that more nectar is coming into the hives and the bees are busy converting it to honey. We have some more “supers” (the smaller top boxes that hold honey) on order as the current ones are getting full already! Honey will be extracted in late
summer.