A Brood of Bees - Sign of a Queen

A couple weeks ago, after our bees swarmed, we checked the hive to see how the bees were progressing with making honeycomb and honey. More importantly, we wanted to see if there was any brood, the eggs, larvae and pupae, which would indicate that there was a new queen present after the swarm left with the original queen.

At the time, we removed all of the frames one by one, and saw lots of honey-making activity, but no brood.

This was a concern to us because without brood, there may be no queen. Without a queen, bees will still make honey, but they will not overwinter. That means that we'd have to start with a new colony next spring.

Not a huge deal, but we thought it would be nice to go through the winter and be able to start with our original hive. Plus it would be a good educational experience to see the life-cycle of the bees from start to finish.

When we checked the hive, we also added two new honey supers, the stacked wooden boxes that comprise the area where bees will make honey that we can harvest. We did this to give them more room to do their work and to prevent another swarm. Our hope was that there was in fact a queen and that she just hadn't gotten around to laying eggs yet in the honey-comb cells, and that the worker bees would ascend into the new supers and make honey that we could harvest this summer.

Capped worker brood in the middle

On Sunday, we checked the hive again from top to bottom. The top super had a few bees in it but no new comb. The middle super had a ton of activity in it, new honey and what we thought were brood cells, which are normally capped over with beeswax when they contain worker brood that have developed into mature larvae on their way to becoming pupae. A very good sign!

In the bottom part of the hive, or the hive body, we found even more activity, and more capped brood.

Then I noticed some whitish looking objects in some of the clear honeycomb cells. Looking closely, I saw what was for sure larvae! The larvae are c-shaped in the cells and eat a mixture of royal jelly, nectar and pollen.

It was an amazing to see the brood cells for the first time and to learn a little bit more about bees and their life cycle. We are looking forward to our first honey harvest in hopefully about a month!