Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The bees were installed into their new hives on Saturday. They have been busy ever since. As soon as the sun shines on the hive boxes they start coming out, flying around, buzzing, collecting pollen. We are soooo tempted to open the box and take a look but we are waiting. Each time you open the hive the colony gets in a bit of a dither. It takes several hours or up to a day for them to get back to normal. Their job right now is to get to know their queen, free the queen from her cage, build cells in preparation for her to lay eggs. The queen has already mated and has eggs ready to lay. It takes 21 days from egg to adult for worker bees and 24 days from egg to adult for drones. Lots of work to be done. Some workers are scouting around looking for food sources even though we are feeding them sugar water. Every day we rescue a few from the pool. We place them in the sun and as soon as they dry off they take flight back to the hive. We assume they are bees from our hives.

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