The queen hard at work

Did you know, that with mason bees, each female is it's own queen?  With the solitary bees, which us what a mason bee is, each female is it's own queen. So with my hive setup, I can have a bunch of queens sharing the hive.  In comparison, social bees, like honeybees, have one queen each hive. 

At the moment of this photo, there are 8.5 tubes filled in the hive.

Here's a picture of what I believe is a queen, laying eggs in a tube. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The end of part 1...intermission

Image
Today was the day I started the waiting game officially. I havent seen any bee a activity for about a week now and we had three strikes after three nights if seeing no bees in the hive at night. So I took down the bee hive today and took out the tubes that contained some sort of occlusion. There were 37 tubes filled. Of these 37, there were about 75% of them full, end to end and the rest were partially full. Found this pollen clump in one of the tubes, almost like a kernel of corn. This was the first tube setup I used by cutting paper straws on the long axis. I decided these three weren't going to move on into storage so we had a science class in the garage explaining the building of the cells and the cocoons. Going from left to right in the tube, we see first the mud cap, then a pollen bunch, larva, and then another cap. This series continues from one end to the other. If you notice the small little black spots...that's bee poop!
Read more

I think it's a little chilly

Image
Found this guy (or girl) sitting outside the give tonight when I went and checked on them. I think it was a bit too cold for him and he just stayed there because he couldn't make it into the hive.  The temperature was about 54 degrees farenheit which is at the lower end of what is optimal for them. I helped him out though and put him in a safe spot in there so he didn't become bird food. Also, the species of bees I have are Japanese Orchard Bees.
Read more

Still hanging in there

Image
So I saw this on Facebook last night. I did t have a chance to check the hive last night so tonight, I went out and checked it. I still have 2 bees hanging in there. Hopefully they will lay some more eggs and help produce another healthy generation next year.
Read more