The girls are doing well, there's still a few boy bees hanging around, it won't be long until they are kicked out the hive. Now the weather has turned slightly the job of going through the hive is less sticky as the propolis is becoming brittle with the colder nights. Our elusive queen even made an appearance!
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| Our Royal Highness, if you look really closely you can see eggs in what look like empty cells |
The queen is kept in the brood boxes of the hive by a queen excluder (below) this stops the queen getting up into the honey as she can't fit through the bars in the excluder. This stops her laying eggs in the honey so that it can be collected and extracted easily without fear of losing the queen or destroying any brood. The excluder is removed in the winter so that the queen can access honey supplies.
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| The queen excluder- worker bees can move through this freely but the queen with her larger abdomen can not access the upper parts of the hive |
Now that it is starting to get autumny (my favourite time of the year) we need to think about varroa control and maybe even feeding the bees to make sure they are strong for winter. We plan to move the bees to the new apiary this month so we will doing our winter prep shortly after.
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