Lessons in Bees: Two Weeks In

So in the past two weeks, I've gone from thinking the bees were diseased, had replaced their faulty queen and were building up their honey comb abnormally to finding out that they were perfectly fine all along!  They're actually doing really well!

Diseased? In class we had learned about a honey bee disease called American foul brood which is probably the worst disease Northeast bees can get.  It's incurable.  Infected larva turn brown (when they're usually pearly white), gooey and glistening.  We also learned about another awful disease called chalkbrood, which could also mean the death of your hive.  With this disease infected larva dry up and look chalky.  Nurse bees come and remove them.  What you find is chalky substance on the bottom board of the hive.

Now I was seeing gooey brown stuff in some individual cells.  I was terrified it was foulbrood.  And then I saw chalky bits on the base board and a moldy bee at the entrance of the hive.  I panicked and thought it was chalkbrood.

Did the Bees Replace a Faulty Queen? After a few days of releasing the queen in to the hive, we started to see supercede cells.  These are cells that the bees draw out from the comb with wax, in anticipation of replacing the queen they currently have.  They make a few of these cells, fill it with a fertilized egg and then feed it royal jelly and it becomes a new queen.  They generally do this when the queen is missing, isn't laying eggs or is laying eggs producing deformed bees, or because the bees just don't trust or accept the queen they have.

Here's one supercede cell

Here's another supercede Cell.  We found about 3 or 4 of them.

I called Mary Duane, one of the teachers and former president of the Worcester County Beekeepers Association.   We opened up the hive together and took a look.  ALL'S WELL!

Diseased? Ha!  Not our bees!  It turns out the black and brown gooey stuff, was just pollen.  Pollen comes in all different colors!  Mostly I think of yellow and orange for colors of pollen, but pollen actually comes in shades of black, blue, green, pink, red, brown, etc., too!  We found one frame where a bunch of different colored cells of pollen were present

See the blue, grey, brown, orange, yellow, black and brown pollen?!?  There is a guy who know the plants that each different color belongs to.

Then the chalky bits on the bottom of the base board were just wax shavings from the bees!  Now I'm saving all the little bits to make candles, soap, etc. later!

Replaced faulty Queen?  Nah.  She's perfect just the way she is.  It was too short of a time for the queen to get superceded.  What most likely happened was the bees, who are unrelated to the queen,were unsure that the queen was going to be healthy.  Just in case, they made the supercede cells, but when the queen proved herself, they deconstructed the cells themselves.

Now they worship her wherever she goes, just like a Queen Bee deserves. :-)

The Queen grew significantly within the first week.  Now she is a lot easier to find!  Plus she has her posse of bees that attend to her while workers move out of her way.

A little trick to get the bees to move out of the way so you can check the cells underneath is to gently blow on them.

Voila!  Now we can see the great pattern!  I'm holding this frame upside down but it is developing in the most ideal way.  The corners contain honey, the top contains pollen to feed the brood, and the center is filling up nicely with health worker brood!

A few other lessons learned:  The abnormal comb development, with them building comb on top of each other in layers, was probably due to the very slight spacing between each frame.  This was fixed by simply making sure there were no gaps whatsoever between frames.  I used the hive tool to push all the frames towards the center.