Meet the bees!

I am a budding beekeeper!  I was first introduced to bees and beekeeping back in elementary school.  My mom took my brother and I to the local arboretum where they have hives and I got to see the apiarists and bees at work.  A friend of mine from orchestra also kept bees, and most recently I found out that one of schoolmates' roommates were keeping bees in Seattle.  Because I'm always in need of yet another hobby, I took on this one.

When installing bees...you basically just dump them from the package into the hive.  They're very gentle because they have no home to defend yet.

I've been studying beekeeping for about six months by reading books I found at the library and going to meetings of the Puget Sound Beekeeper's Association.  I took their beginning beekeeper class, became an Washington State apprentice beekeeper and am working with the owner of Seattle Bee Works to help her care for two of her sixteen hives around the city.  I ordered hive components, stained and assembled them and put in an order for eight pounds of bees and two Carniolan queens.

The queens come separated from the other bees in a little wooden screened cage.  The bees you see clinging to the cage are responding to the queen's pheromones.

These are my cute, furry bees!

The packages arrived April 20th and, with the help of Boyfriend, I installed them into the two hives.  I started the bees off with two boxes and two jars of 1:1 sugar syrup each.  I let the queens out a few days later and they started to work!

A new colony of bees needs to eat, so I feed them sugar syrup in jars.  The lids have little holes poked in them so the bees can suck out the syrup with their probosces.

My bees made comb and the queen started laying soon after installation.  The colored holes have pollen in them.  In the holes where you can see white, that is a larva being fed royal jelly and bee bread.  The capped cells are growing pupae.  All the bees shown are worker (female) bees.

My two hives are different colors: ebony and oak, so I have named my queens accordingly.  The one in the ebony hive is Niobe and the one in the oak hive is Beatrix.  I suspect that Beatrix is a much stronger queen than Niobe based on their laying patterns.  Beatrix has a nice tight pattern, but Niobe's is a bit sparse.  This hunch is being further proven by the fact that Niobe's hive has made two supercedure cells.  Because it's early in the season, I'm going to leave them to it and see what happens.  I'm not really hellbent on getting honey, I'm more into the interest of it all.

This is Niobe (the bee in the center).  She produces pheromones, causing the bees surrounding her to face her.  New queens take one flight to be fertilized by drone (male) bees.  When they return, they have enough sperm stored in their spermatheca to last them about three years.  A productive queen can lay around 2000 eggs per day.  Bees only have one sex chromosome, X, so drones are unfertilized (X0) and workers and queens are fertilized (XX).

We'll see what happens...