Bee Yard Activity
A bee yard is called an apiary. These beekeepers are inspecting all the hives of this apiary. Typically, the hives will be inspected every 9 days. The smaller boxes have newly mated queens getting ready to be combined with a colony of worker bees.
A bee hive. Each hive has only one queen, but can have many boxes. Each box has 8 or 10 frames. The frames will contain brood and honey in the first two boxes. In these, the queen raises her brood. When the hive is strong and ready to make honey, the beekeeper will add more boxes where the bees only store honey. Most hives start with only one box and the beekeeper will add more boxes throughout the season as the colony grows in size. A hive in our urban area can grow to 5 or 6 boxes tall. 3 to 4 boxes high is more typical, but we always hope for a productive year.
These are 3 lb packages of honey bees that we shake from existing hives. Each package will combined with one of our new queens so she has help getting started raising her brood. These worker bees will only live 3 to 4 weeks, but that is long enough for your queen to get started. She and the colony will begin the year of brood-rearing and honey production. Each package contains about 8,000 to 10,000 bees. By mid summer, this colony will grow to 50,000 honey bees. That’s when the honey starts to flow and the fun begins.
A frame of new honey bee queens soon to emerge. This is what they look like during development.
That’s our beautiful queen working in her hive. Look how all the workers are facing her.
Visiting day with an open hive inspection.
This frame shows that our queen is doing a great job of laying her brood. The white capped cells on the corners contain honey and some of the pollen they need to feed the larva and brood.
This frame is all honey. A frame of honey like this can contain 4 to 6 lbs of honey.
The sweet rewards of beekeeping!