These girls are trying to clean up the mess we are making as we open their hive and take the honey from the box above them. This is honey from an August harvest that has a bit of knotweed, giving it the red color.
Four different harvests- all from 2021 and all from Northwest Indiana. The variety of blooms creates an amazing array of flavors and colors.
Hive one at sunrise.
Spring pollen colors vary depending on what kind of source the bees visit. Common spring pollen includes cottonwood, maple, willow and clover in my yard.
When I open a busy hive, this is what greets me. Worker bees watch to see what I'm doing before deciding to ignore me, fly in my face and "ask" me what I'm doing or just defend the hive by head butting me prior to a sting, which would kill her. They take their time assessing the situation.
Drones remind me of fuzzy teddy bears. They are larger than the worker bees but not as long as a mated queen. Their abdomen looks very different than the female bodies and they have no stinger.
Honeybees process the honey inside their bodies then place it into the wax cells for storage. Here you can see her abdomen has space to create and store honey.
Worker bees tending to larvae, eggs and closing the baby bees up so they can continue growing into their adult, female form. Drones are grown in larger cells than the workers and also take longer to hatch.
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Queen cells on the bottom of the frame indicate the bees are ready to swarm and a new queen has hatched from one of those cells. Can you find her?
Queen cell open after she has emerged.
Here is a queen emerging from her cell.
The wax that creates the honeycomb is made from tiny flakes that the worker bee excretes from an area on the bottom of her abdomen.
Newly created wax is light colored while older comb can be dark and dense.
In order to extract the honey from the comb, we have to cut off the wax caps that hold it in place.
Here, I am using a hot knife to cut off the wax cappings prior to extracting honey from the frames.
Here is honey coming out of the extractor and through it's one filter to remove wax cappings that were cut off.
When worker bees are without a queen, sometimes we have to purchase one and introduce her to the hive. This is a tiny transport cage for a queen and about 5 of her workers that will feed her and attend to her inside that little box until she is properly introduced into the new hive.
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Here I am retrieving a swarm of bees from a tree branch.
This swarm was very large and despite my best efforts, did not stay in the box I placed them into.
Honeybees hard at work on a honey super (medium box in which they store their surplus honey).