Apiaries and Blackberries

One and a half gallons of syrup has been transformed by these little buggers in just one week. Five to six gallons of syrup per hive will be comsumed by these new colonies in the first month. The honeybees work together as a collective. Each bee shares in the daily "chores". The average lifespan of a workerbee is five to six weeks. Within the colony the youngest bees are responsible to clean the brood cells. At one or two days of age the young bee is promoted to the brood caste. Her jobs include feeding and capping the brood and attending to the queen. By around the eleventh day her responsibility will again change. The young worker bee enters the food storage caste. She will work the nest; groom and feed workmates, ventilate the hive and shape comb. The bee will eventually move out of the brood nest and up into the food storage area where she will fill comb cells with the nectar and pollen she receives from the arriving foragers. Once the bee reaches two to three weeks of age; she is promoted to "forager". Foraging even has it's own division of labor; specialist of certain species of plants, patches of flowers, collecting pollen, collecting nectar or collecting water. Some of the older bees will become guard bees and monitor the entry for intruders and protect the hive with their lives. This is the life cycle of the workerbee.

After 30 days the upper frames begin to fill. New bees are being born and things are starting to look quite magnificent. It won't be long before we remove the syrup and add the honey supers. The bees will then draw out the comb in the honey super and use the "upstairs" unit for storing their precious honey and pollen. The bottom units (hive body) will be used for brood. Brood is the term used for eggs, larve and pupae collectively.

Typically beekeepers place foundation (sheets of wax) in the frames to save the bees time and for consistent comb. This frame only has a 2 inch strip of starter foundation. This allows us to observe how the bees construct their hive without our assistance. The Top bar type hive is similar but has no frame at all. This method does not optimize the apiaries honey production because the bees have to spend more energy building the comb.

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