Know Your Bees

Once your bees are installed, it’s important to understand how to monitor their health and progress as a colony. Below is some advice on how to do this effectively.

Getting to Know Your Bees

As a new beekeeper, the best thing you can do is spend time with your bees. This includes making routine hive inspections usually once a week in the Spring and Autumn, and once a month in the Summer. You can also spend time with your bees by watching them come in and out of the hive and observing them in your garden. The best skill a beekeeper can have is recognizing their bees: how they move, sound, smell, what they are bringing into the hive, what they are building, what they are storing. Once a beekeeper knows what their bees do, they have the ability to notice when something is different, allowing the beekeeper to seek instruction when something changes. In your first season, everything will be new, and it is helpful to find a mentor and some reliable resources on bees and beekeeping.

Who's in the Hive?

Worker Bee

Almost all of the bees in a colony are worker bees. These bees are all female, and they run the show. Throughout their lives, worker bees have a variety of jobs from feeding brood, cleaning house, building comb, caring for the queen, storing honey and pollen, guarding the front door, and finally foraging for pollen and nectar outside the hive. While it is easily mistaken that the Queen is in charge, it is actually the worker bees who communally make all of decisions in the hive. They decide and prepare to swarm and raise new queens when necessary etc.

Queen Bee

There is only one queen in every colony. Her only job is to lay eggs. She can lay up to 2000 eggs a day at peak season! Unlike other bees, queen bees can live for up to three years. The worker bees take very good care of their queen, because without her the colony can struggle to survive. The mother of every member inside the colony, the queen also defines the genetic makeup of the colony. Their temperament, personalities, and behavioral qualities are all inherited from the queen.

Drone Bee

Drone bees are the only males in the hive. Their only job is to mate. They wait around their whole lives to mate with a virgin queen. If they are lucky enough they will mate once after which they fall to their death because their sexual organs are barbed, similar to a worker bee’s stinger, and pull out their insides upon copulation. A queen will mate with 5-15 drones once in her life, and spend the rest of her life inside the hive. Drones do no work inside the hive; they do not even have stingers to defend the hive with. The worker bees often care for them and feed them, but they are quick to kick the drones out in the fall once they are no longer necessary.

Brood

Brood is a term for baby bees in the hive. This includes eggs, larvae, and pupating bees inside the cells. Once they have emerged from their cell, they are adult bees.