I've been trying to get this on camera for a while now - a bee's first steps from hatching out!
As you can see, she is quite grey and fluffy. This disappears very quickly and will get rubbed off in a few minutes.Another beautiful day for opening the hive and the bees were much calmer today - I think it was the cramped conditions as much as the gloomy weather that was aggravating them before.
They haven't made much progress with building wax in the super yet - we found they'd only just begun on this one frame so far.You can see that these frames are far shallower than the brood frames we've been using so far - you can see why that is in this picture:
A brood frame like this with masses of sealed honey is incredibly heavy and awkward to lift and rotate freely to check both sides. This much weight can also cause the whole honeycomb to drop straight out of the frame if the wax gets too warm - one of the house bees' main jobs on hot days like this is to try to cool everything down!One thing which is noticeably different from the last inspection is the amount of propolis (also known as 'bee-glue') in the hive. This is a thick, gummy antibacterial goo which has tree resin as its main ingredient. It is sticky like soft toffee and bees make it to stick everything together.` It could be that a fine source of tree resin has just become available nearby or maybe the bees have felt a chill wind and decided to spend a day sealing all the cracks up!
These 'before and after' pictures show how they tried to glue the queen excluder into place.
We found Amidala quite easily again today (although she only has a tiny speck of her red blob left!). She is visible in this next picture - in the top right, about a third of the way down.
Looking at these pictures it seems hard to imagine there being more bees required but this is still not a full hive!
