My father and I started an a new apiary this late spring as I’m fascinated by the complex processes surrounding the life of the Honey Bee. Our first hive is made up of a bottom, 2 deeps, a medium honey super and a top feeder. Deeps are the main boxes that are much taller then medium honey supers. We also are using 8 frame hives which is easier and has more advantages then 10 frame hives with weight being the main one.
I plan covering more about the bees as I learn here on my blog to further my studies in entomology & specifically apiology.
The types of cells in a Honey Bee hive are:
Honey Storage Cells
- Uncapped Honey Cells
- Capped Honey Cells
Brood Cells
- Capped Worker Cells
- Capped Drone Cells
Queen Cells
- Supersedure
- Swarm
I will be going further into each of these type of cells in later blog posts. For now let me point out what I’m seeing in my hive.
Drone and Brood Cells
Along this frame in my hive you can see the yellow capped brood cells. These will replace the worker bees one day soon as worker bees only live about a month or so. Intermixed in the cells you can see some are more pronounced and look like big bumps. The bigger cells will become drone cells, which are male bees. Yes, Girls do all the work and gather all the honey. Girl power! 🙂
You can see lines of empty cells. I’m told that could be due to the wire in the frame and sometimes Queens are picky and don’t like to lay along those.
A mix of Brood, Drone and uncapped Honey
The frame below shows a mix of brood, drone and uncapped honey cells. The brood cells can be seen again in the center with uncapped honey surrounding them on the top left and right and the left and right sides. Once the uncapped honey reaches the correct moisture level the bees will cap them. The drone cells can be seen along the bottom.
I hope you enjoyed this look into my hive, and I hope you have learned something. I know I’m learning a lot and have only began this journey. I’ll leave with a great video on how to read a frame. Beekeeping Made Simple is an awesome channel! And a link for further reading!