On the left, a stretched prepupa (age 11 to 14 days from the egg being laid). Here we see drones in various stages of development. Potential queens continue to get royal jelly. After 3 days, non-queen larvae are switched to a diet of bee bread (stored pollen) and honey. Paraphrasing my friend, John, larvae eat “like tomorrow is just a rumor, like they’re going to the chair.” Larvae are fed hundreds of times per day by the workers.įor the first few days, all larvae are fed royal jelly secreted from the glands of nurse bees.
LarvaĪs pictured above, the larva at first looks like a small, white worm. The outer shell (the chorion) gradually dissolves exposing the larva. That’s quite a jump from the approximately 10,000 that you got in your bee package.Īfter 3 days, the egg “hatches.” This doesn’t happen the way you might imagine, like a bird breaking out of a shell. If all goes well, by midsummer your hive population will be up around 40,000 – 50,000 bees. Getting direct sunlight on it helps a lot.Ī healthy, productive queen can lay somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 eggs per day. You’ll also see multiple eggs in cells if you have a laying worker.Įggs are easier to spot on black foundation or in the older, darker, reused comb. What about a laying worker? Laying workers are not as neat as the queen. We know the queen has been there within the last 3 days from the neat pattern of one egg per cell. (If you’ve come this far, you probably find this as amazing as I do.)Įggs can be seen on the right side of the comb in the photo above. Fertilized eggs are placed in larger cells to accommodate the larger drones that will develop. As mentioned above, she will lay either unfertilized egg (to become drones) or fertilized eggs (workers). Workers prepare cells for the queen to lay eggs. Use the information you gather to address issues in the hive. If, on the other hand, you see empty cells and can’t find her royal highness, your hive may be queenless.
You are better able to identify issues that need to be addressed.įor example, if you don’t see the queen but eggs are visible, you know the queen was laying within the past 3 days. Understanding the life cycle of the bees and the roles they play are essential in assessing the health of your queen and colony. Spotty brood patterns are an indication that the queen is not healthy or that you have a laying worker. Workers will enter these cells to help warm the brood if needed.Ī healthy, productive, laying queen will leave a tight pattern of capped brood in her wake. Speckled among the capped brood you may see unused cells. Advertisementsĭrone cells, housing larger bees, will protrude higher than capped worker cells. Unlike honey caps they are convex, jutting up above the comb.
Queen – The queen bee is a fertilized female that normally lays all the eggs in the hive.