royal jelly

drone comb close-up

too much moisture in the hive

fanning from Jonathan Dy on Vimeo.

sunday

10 to 1

in the morning..  

big plans

after a hive realizes it's queenless, the workers get busy building emergency queen cells:



raises questions: are these the same as swarm cells? will all these princesses swarm off with part of the hive? or does first-to-hatch kill the rest?

secondary swarms

crazy; Monday's large swarm spit out 3 secondary swarms yesterday, neatly landing on the back fence:





I didn't know what to make of it, and then I found this Wikipedia comment:

As many as 21 virgin queens have been counted in a single large swarm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee

so my current theory is that the original large swarm contain four or more princesses, three of which left the next day in after-swarms of their own.

Here you can see a the virgin queen of one swarm being tended to, after I sprayed the whole bunch with water to weigh them down and make it more difficult to fly: