The bees simply bite off a chunk of wax, mix it with their own saliva, chew it into the right consistency, and then build new comb with it somewhere else in the hive. If later in the season they want to use the frames they borrowed from, they will repair the entire thing such that you can barely see what they did.
Read MoreUncapped honey in your supers? Learn what you need to watch for to identify why it’s uncapped and what you can do to help the honey bee capping process.
Read MoreThere are lots of dead or dying bees in front of the hive. Several hundred per day for the last 2-3 weeks. Some are dead; others are ‘shivering,’ weak, unable to fly, maybe walking a little.
Read MoreI have a 10-frame deep hive that had honey in it. There have not been bees in the hive in a year. Now there were 200 to 300 bees in there. I think that it’s just bees getting the old honey out of there, but they are fanning the honey as if they want to cap it. And I would like to know if the bees will stay in there at night or fly back home at dark?
Read MoreHoney bees are eusocial, meaning they live in highly complex social colonies, with multiple casts and tens of thousands of individuals of overlapping generations.
Read MoreWhen bees washboard, they space themselves on the surface of their hive then they plant their four rear legs in place and use their two front legs to step forward and back in a rocking motion while they lick the surface. Sometimes a colony will washboard for a day or two, but at other times it may continue for weeks.
Read MoreThe simplest answer to “how to catch a swarm of bees” is this — get the queen and all the ladies in something you can safely transport them in back to your apiary.
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