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What Is A Worker Bee

I look out into my flower garden and the honey bees I see in our flowers – probably from our hives – are all worker bees.

What is a worker bee? Worker bees make up 90% or more of the bees in a beehive and do every job in the colony except lay fertilized eggs and, because they are female, they don’t mate with the queen. They do all the work and run the hive.

Those short sentences don’t do worker bees justice. They are fascinating little creatures who begin their multiple roles in life as soon as they emerge from their brood cells.

Who Is Who In The Hive

A hive has three types of bees: a queen, drones, and workers.

In a colony of 20-60,000 bees, there is one queen. She lays the eggs and emits a pheromone that tells the bees that all is well. The largest bee in the hive is the queen.

There are a few hundred to a thousand male bees known as drones. The males are the next largest in size.

Their job is to fly to an area known as the drone congregation area to wait for the chance to mate with virgin queens from any colonies in the area. They mate once and then die.

Everyone else in the colony is a female worker bee and the rest of this article is about these amazing girls and what they do. And, yes, we refer to our worker bees as “our girls”, so you may find me interchanging that with the term “worker bees”.

Making A Worker Bee

During the first three days, any fertile egg in the hive can become a worker bee or a queen.

During days one through three, all egg cells are given royal jelly.

Eggs become larvae by day four and workers in the hive begin to feed what is known as “bee bread”, a mixture of pollen and honey, to the worker larvae in the brood cells. Plant chemicals in the bee bread effectively sterilize the growing bee, so she will become a worker, not a queen.

On the sixth day, the larval cell is capped with wax and the pupa continues to develop until it emerges from its cell on day twenty-one and takes its place as a worker bee in the colony.

What Are The Roles Of A Worker Bee In The Hive?

The roles of the worker bees are many. Here is a list of about two dozen jobs.

Workers in the summer live about six weeks or 42 days. I’ve made a note of the approximate times some of these jobs take place.

Cell Cleaning
Hive Cleaning
Cleaning Other Bees
Mortuary Bees
Nurse Bees
Drone Feeders
Queen Attendants
Wax Production and Comb Building
Hive Repair
Foraging Bees
Propolizing
Nectar – Receiving, Fanning, and Honey Capping
Pollen-Packing
Fanning Bees
Guard Bees
Swarming
Winter Bees

Even though there are no drill sergeants and no house mothers with lists, all the jobs in a hive get done. Bees are very tidy creatures, and housekeeping takes several forms.

1. Cell Cleaning

The first one or two days.

As soon as a young worker bee emerges from its brood chamber, its first job is housekeeping duties. It cleans out brood cells, including its own so the queen can use them again for egg laying.

2. Hive Cleaning

Besides cleaning out cells, workers clean out all debris from the hive. There are bits and pieces of wax, dead bees, pollen, dirt and things that the beekeeper has left in the hive that need to be cleared away.

3. Cleaning Other Bees

Bees may have stray bits, dust and other things on them. They may have nectar of sugar syrup that needs to be cleaned off.

4. Mortuary Bees

In the first two weeks.

Most bees die as foragers while they’re out in the fields. Some bees do die in the hive. Some larvae don’t grow to maturity.

Bees like to keep their homes clean. Dead bees are debris that can potentially become moldy or cause diseases. They are pulled out of the hive and flown a distance away.

5. Nurse Bees

The first two weeks.

These girls take care of the eggs and larvae. They examine the egg or larva and then feed it royal jelly for the first three days. After that, worker and drone larvae are fed bee bread.

Queens, on the other hand, are fed only royal jelly, which is made by the nurse bees in their hypopharynx gland. They are fed royal jelly for their whole lives.

Queen eggs and larvae are fed for 5.5 days before being capped with wax. Drones for 6.5 days and worker bees for 6 days.

6. Drone Feeding

Up to first two weeks.

Young drones are fed for several days after emerging from their wax cell. According to Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium, the drones can feed themselves after four days, but they prefer to be fed.

7. Queen Attendants

The second week.

A retinue of six to ten bees attend the queen, feeding and grooming her. The queen can lay up to her own body weight in eggs in a day, so the more eggs she lays, the more the attendants feed her.

Another essential task happens as the workers tend the queen.

The queen releases what is called a “queen mandibular pheromone”, QMP. This scent is transferred to her attendants as they groom and feed her. In turn, it is transferred to other workers and spread throughout the colony. The strength and quality tell the hive that the queen is alive and well.

8. Wax Production and Comb Building

Wax production occurs around the third week.

Worker bees have eight wax glands, four to a side, on the underside of their abdomens. The wax produced comes out in little scale like pieces.

Comb building can occur from the second through the fifth weeks.

Worker bees seem to be very efficient at delegating. The bees who produce the wax aren’t the builders. Other worker bees take the wax from the producers and they build the wax comb in the hive.

9. Hive Repair

Whether the honeycomb builders also do repair work, I do not know, but repair is another chore done by the house bees.

10. Foraging Bees

Worker bees spend the last three weeks their lives foraging.

Bees will go as far from the hive as five miles. Three miles is the usual extent of their range and if there is good forage, they will stay within a mile of home.

The four main items foragers collect and bring back to the hive are:

nectar – for making honey
pollen – protein supplies
tree resin – from buds and sap
water – for cooling the hive

Nectar is collected through a straw-like tongue called a proboscis. It is stored in a “honey stomach”, a crop in the foregut, for the return to the hive. Enzymes in the honey stomach begin the process of turning nectar into honey. Water is also carried in the crop.

Pollen is collected in “pollen baskets”. These are areas on the back set of legs where stiff hairs hold the pollen until it is delivered to the hive. Pollen baskets are also used to carry resin for making propolis.

A worker bee will collect only one of these four items during a trip. Bees in the hive indicate by their eagerness to take the cargo whether more is wanted or something else is needed.

11. Propolizing

Another house chore is collecting resin from forager bees. They mix this with stomach enzymes, wax and honey to create propolis, sometimes known as “bee glue”. Propolis fills cracks and is used to contain pathogens that intruders have brought into the hive.

From a beekeeper’s perspective, propolis is used to coat everything we want clean and to stick everything together that we want to separate, including the fingers of our gloves. I usually manage to get it on my cell phone when I’m taking pictures of our beehives. It is exceptionally sticky.

12. Nectar – Receiving, Fanning, and Honey Capping

Honey capping is on the chore list during the third through fifth weeks.

Workers receive nectar from foraging bees. They “chew” it for up to a half hour, adding enzymes, and then spread it out in honeycomb cells where it can dry.

Nectar is about 70% water and honey has about 17% water content. To evaporate the water in nectar that has been deposited in honeycomb, workers fan their wings.

When the nectar has converted reduced to honey, it is capped over with wax.

13. Pollen-Packing

The third week.

Foragers bring pollen back to the hive and workers take it from them. It is mixed with a bit of honey to keep bacteria from forming and packed into cells in the wax comb. Pollen isn’t capped over the way honey is.

14. Fanning Bees

The third week.

Temperature control is vital in the colony. If it gets too hot, water carrier bees will gather water in an internal water crop and bring it to the hive.

Once there, the water carriers deposit the water on the backs of bees who will fan their wings, using evaporation to cool off the hive.

15. Guard Bees

The third week, after the stinger and venom are fully developed.

These girls stay near the entrances to the hive. They are few in number, a dozen or two, but if pheromones announcing a significant threat are released, more workers mobilize. However, if minor threats call them away from the entrance, they aren’t immediately replaced. There is no roster of back-up bees. They check bees entering the hive and protect from intruders, and their number will vary, depending on the season and hive activity.

We can vouch for their diligence. Occasionally both of us have had to run when we were checking the entrances and weren’t in our beekeeping gear.

16. Swarming

When a colony decides to swarm, it is the workers who make the call. I’ll talk about that under a separate heading.

17. Winter Bees

Winter bees have a different life from the workers that live in the hive the rest of the year. They get a section to themselves below.

What’s The Waggle Dance And Why Do Worker Bees Do It?

Worker bees do what is known as the waggle dance. It’s a form of communication between forager bees.

If a forager finds a good source of nectar or pollen, inside the hive she tells the other forager bees where that location is. Human interpretation of the dance is that the number of circles or figure eights, the vigor of the waggle, and the angle of the dance on the comb indicated the direction and quantity or quality of the food source. There has also bee some discussion of transference of an electrical charge from the forager to her fellows.

Worker Bees And Swarming

When bees decide to leave home in a swarm, it is the worker bees who have made the call.

Swarming, when half of the bees in a colony fly away with the queen to find a new home, is the way bee populations spread and increase.

Before swarming, the workers prepare the hive, the queen, and they prepare themselves.

Workers build what are called queen cups. These are large brood cells where queen bees are created. When eggs have been laid, fed royal jelly, and have reached the stage where they are capped, then the colony is close to ready to swarm.

Workers feed the queen less and less in days before the flight so she will be light enough to fly with the swarm. On the other hand, the workers eat more, storing it in their bodies, as fuel reserves for the days they fly and set up a new hive.

Before swarming, scouts will find a suitable temporary place for the swarm to land.

When swarming begins, the bees fly out in large numbers, pushing the queen out along with them. They fly to the temporary location, where they mass around the queen, while scouts fly out to find a new permanent location for the colony to live. The scouts fly back, do waggle dances to indicate the location and type of place they have located, a decision is made, and the bees fly to their new home.

Workers Bees In The Winter

The job of the worker bee in winter is to protect the queen from the cold and to preserve the colony of bees so the hive survives through to the spring.

The worker bees going into winter are known as “fat bees”. They differ from the workers in other seasons because they have eaten large amounts of pollen and stored it in their bodies instead of feeding it to brood because in the winter there is no brood.

The food reserves are more nourishing than the summer diet and lead to a longer life and a more robust bee. These girls can live up to 6 months because they are well fed and don’t wear themselves out with daily foraging flights.

Unlike many insects, worker bees can generate heat and maintain a high body temperature. They do this by rapidly flexing their flight muscles.

During winter, the bees form a cluster surrounding the queen within the hive. They disengage or disarticulate their wings from the flight muscles and shiver or vibrate to create warmth. The center of a cluster will reach temperatures of 85 ° F when there is no brood to warm. In late winter and early spring when the queen has begun to lay eggs, the workers will heat the center of the cluster up to 95° F.

The outside of the cluster will be around 48° F, which is too cold for bees to survive long. The workers rotate position, with the colder bees on the outer edges of the cluster moving toward the center as the warmer center bees move toward the outside of the cluster.

Can A Worker Bee Lay Eggs?

A worker bee is sterile, but, yes, she can lay eggs.

A colony that has a healthy, active, laying queen is known as “queen right”.

When a colony is not queen right, that usually means the queen is dead, ailing, sterile, or not laying eggs properly. The workers sense that all is not right with the health of the colony and they will begin to lay eggs when their queen does not.

The eggs workers lay aren’t fertilized, so all they can produce is drones.

With our very first beehives, we knew that something was not right with one of the packages of bees we installed. Within two weeks, the hive had drone brood and no worker brood. A quick check with our mentor confirmed that we had an unmated or sterile queen and either she or the workers were laying drone eggs. Fortunately, we caught this within the first two weeks and a new queen set the hive right.

Can A Laying Worker Bee Make A Queen Bee?

Someone asked if a laying worker can make a queen. The answer is no. Workers can, however, make a queen but not from their own eggs.

If workers sense that they need a new queen, they are the ones deciding when and which eggs are to become queens. They need to have eggs no older than three days that have been laid by a fertile queen. Given these, they will enlarge the brood cells and feed the future queens a diet of only royal jelly.

We once collected a swarm that had no queen. We took a frame with eggs from another hive and placed it in with the swarm bees. We did this three times at intervals of about five days, and finally on the third frame, the girls made a beautiful necklace of queen cells with the eggs that we provided them.

What Is The Lifespan Of A Worker Bee

The average life of a worker bee is about 6 weeks.

When they become foragers, they fly every day until their wings become tattered and they wear themselves out. Or they find themselves too far from home and the weather to cool to make it back to the hive.

In winter, workers have eaten more pollen and honey and are more robust bees and they rarely fly far from the hive. They can live up to six months.

If a worker stings you, it will die. The stingers are barbed so the bee can’t pull it out to fly away or to sting again. Separating the bee from the stinger rips off the end of its abdomen, killing the bee.

Why Are Worker Bees Important And What Do They Do For Us?

Foraging worker bees pollinate plants by carrying pollen from one flower and one plant to another.

A third of our food crops are fertilized by bees and other pollinators. Up to 90% of wild plants are fertilized by pollinators. Our world would be very barren without bees.

When Should I Feed My Bees

When we got our first two packages of bees, we were told to feed them syrup while they built comb in our brand-new hives. This was a whole new area of beekeeping: when to feed the bees, what to feed the bees, how to feed the bees.

When should we feed our honey bees? Feed them when it helps them survive. That can be when you’re establishing bees in a new hive, in very early spring, during summer dearth, in fall to prepare for winter, in mid to late winter if their own honey supplies are getting low.

There is more to it than that. Each region has a different climate, different concerns, and has its own practices, and every beekeeper has his own opinions. This is what we’ve learned so far and a few views of our own.

When Should You Feed Your Bees?

A good practice is to feed based on the needs of the hive.

You can feed your bees in every season of the year. Some people will feed a new hive nonstop, especially if the bees continue to eat up what you’re feeding them.

The goal is that the bees will be able to take care of themselves all year round. Natural food, rather than human-supplied supplementation, is better for your colonies.

Let’s go through feeding, season by season:

in the spring
a new package of bees
a new swarm of bees
during summer
in fall
in winter

Feeding Bees In The Spring

Established hives that have made it through the winter are low on supplies and begin foraging flights to bring in nectar and pollen as soon as the weather allows.

To give the hive a head start to the season, feed 1:1 sugar syrup that simulates nectar flow and also feed pollen patties. This will encourage the queen to begin laying eggs and building up the colony.

If your area has good weather and heavy nectar flow with ample pollen, you may not need to feed. We feed here because our springs tend to have many cold and rainy days interspersed with lovely warm spring weather.

Feeding A New Package Of Bees

We started beekeeping with packages of bees, and those bees began with almost nothing.

They had a new queen, a hive with no honey stores, no pollen, no drawn comb. This is often the situation when you are starting out.

It takes a tremendous amount of nectar or honey for bees to build wax comb for the queen to lay eggs in and for the workers to store honey and pollen in. To give your bees a boost, feed them.

At this time of year, you’ll be feeding sugar syrup (more about that below). Keep feeding your bees until they have comb drawn on several frames and there are brood cells, showing that your queen is laying. This can be for several weeks. Decide by looking at your hive, not by looking at the calendar.

Do not feed too long. What can happen if you feed too long is that the bees diligently fill all the cells with nectar, leaving the queen no empty cells to lay eggs in. This is called being “honey bound”. If this happens, your bees may swarm. Yes, as new beekeepers, this happened to us.

Feeding A New Swarm Of Bees

A swarm of bees is in the same situation as a new package of bees. They do have their own queen and they are loaded with honey for their adventure, but they still go into a new hive.

Feed them until they are established. If you’ve put the bees into a hive with no drawn comb, feed as long as you would a package of bees.

Feeding During Late Summer

I was surprised in August of our second year of beekeeping, when we took off the honey supers and found that none of our hives had more than a token of honey in the brood chambers.

Lest you should think that we stole all our bees’ winter honey stores, we collected a total of fewer than two gallons of honey from five hives. Not much.

This was when we were introduced to the reality of what is known as the “summer dearth”.

To our eyes, flowers are blooming everywhere and life for the bees is good. From the bee perspective, favored nectar sources are just not producing enough nectar to supply the hive. This happens during the dry spells of the summer or during droughts.

Out came our feeders, and in went the sugar syrup.

We also made sure there was water available. We always have a plant saucer filled with stones and water. During the dearth we filled Boardman entrance feeders with water for each hive.

How long to leave the feeders on?

Ask five beekeepers and you’ll get seven answers – at least that’s been our experience.

When we began to feed, the girls would go through a gallon of syrup a day. Eventually, as the next set of plants started blooming and the bees had some sugar syrup honey stored, they stopped consuming as much syrup or stopped eating it entirely. Then we took off the feeders.

Two things to remember.

On that last point, if we had been using ‘western’ size brood boxes rather than deeps, we would have taken the frames from our honey supers and put them in with the bees.

All bees are affected by the dearth. This means that bees from strong hives may try to rob honey from weaker hives. It is a time to put on entrance reducers and to close off other openings to keep out marauding yellow jackets, hornets and wasps.

Should You Feed Bees In The Fall?

What determines whether you feed in the fall is how much honey and pollen your bees have stored in their hives. They need these stores to survive through the winter.

Most beekeepers around here feed in the fall. In the Pacific Northwest, which has mild temperatures and long autumns, that can mean feeding in October.

How do you know if they have enough honey? The general rule of thumb is the weight of the hive.

This weight varies by climate. I was checking online to see the differences between southern and northern states, and how many pounds a hive should be to get through the winter can vary by 60 pounds or more per hive. Check with beekeepers to see what the standard is in your local area.

The easiest way to check the weight is to screw an eye bolt into the slatted board, attach a luggage scale, and lift the side of the hive. This is an approximation, but it is good for keeping an eye on relative weights throughout the fall and winter.

This is the time to move to 2:1 sugar syrup. It is a mixture of 2 pounds of sugar to one pint (pound) of water. The heavy syrup is closer to the consistency of honey, and some beekeepers think this is an added incentive for the bees to store it. We do it because everyone else around here does.

Should I Feed Bees In Winter?

If your bees haven’t enough frames of honey stored to last through the winter, yes, you should definitely feed your bees.

If you have checked your hives in late fall, you will know how many frames of honey they have. If you weighed your hives in the fall, you can weigh the hives at intervals through the winter and compare how the honey stores are holding up.

It is better to feed and have the hive make it through to the spring than to guess they have enough honey stores and have a dead colony.

One of our friends, who rarely loses a hive through the winter, puts on candy boards and quilt blankets the first week of November every year. Another checks his hives and rarely feeds until January.

During the cold months, you’ll feed solid sugar, not liquid syrup.

What Should I Feed My Bees?

Sugar in one form or another is the standard food to feed bees.

Depending on the time of the year, you may be feeding your bees:

sugar syrup
fondant
sugar/sugar cakes
pollen

Liquid sugar syrup is used when the weather is 50 degrees or above. Here, the nights will dip into the 40’s, but the days are warm.

In spring and summer, use 1:1 syrup, which is one pound of sugar to one pound (a pint) of water
In fall use 2:1 syrup, which is 2 pounds of sugar to one pound (pint) of water

The sugar has to be thoroughly dissolved in the water, so many beekeepers use hot water. You can make large batches this way. I’m not a fan of handling hot sugar syrup, so we run smaller batches of sugar and water in our Vitamix at high speed for a couple of minutes.

In winter give the bees fondant, sugar cakes or granulated sugar. Liquid syrup will get too cold for the bees to eat. If the bees aren’t using it, it can mold.

Fondant is a sugar candy made by boiling sugar and water till it reaches 235 degrees, the soft ball stage. It is removed from heat and, when cool enough, kneaded or beaten in a mixer until it is white and silky smooth. This is made into cakes or patties to be given to the hives.

Some beekeepers sprinkle granulated sugar onto newspaper directly on the frames of the top deep and some put it on the top of the inner cover.

We mix granulated sugar with a small amount of water and put it into several small pans to dry and harden into cakes.

Our mentor has tried half price after Christmas candy canes with good results.

Bees invert the sugars in cane sugar from sucrose to fructose and glucose. Fondant begins this process. Adding a small amount of vinegar and some other ingredients may also accomplish this. Whether it is necessary or even helpful for people to start this process for the bees isn’t thoroughly established.

With dry sugar or fondant, the bees don’t have to work to remove the moisture. They can use every advantage in the middle of the cold season.

What type of sugar do you feed bees?

We use plain white cane sugar. As beginning beekeepers we were told not to use beet sugar. The theory is that beets are sprayed with pesticides which can be toxic to them. I would think that it would be toxic to us, too! Other than that, I haven’t found any information on why white granulated beet sugar would be harmful.

We use cane sugar because we can buy it in 25-pound bags inexpensively at Costco.

Do not use raw sugar, organic sugar or brown sugar. These can contain substances that harm the bees. Molasses, for instance, that is in raw sugar and brown sugar can cause dysentery in bees. Not good.

What about honey?

You may wonder if you can feed your bees honey. The reserved answer is ‘yes’.

To keep your bees safe from disease and contamination, the only good honey to feed them is by giving them frames of honey from another of your beehives. The caveats are that the hive you take honey frames from must have an overabundance of its own honey and that the bees are healthy.

You don’t want to give your bees combs filled with old honey because it may have fermented. Honeycomb from the current year should be good.

We also set out the frames we’ve extracted honey from to let the bees clean up the bits of honey that are left. We do no put them near the hives because there it may cause aggressive behavior between our bees. Repeat: not near the hives.

Don’t feed them honey from the store. You don’t know the quality or purity. It can have contaminants or be watered down. What is fine for us might be bad for your bee colony.

Pollen

Pollen is essential to bees when the queen is laying and there is brood to be fed.

If some of your hives have produced large numbers of frames of stored pollen, you can use that as a supplement. Most pollen fed to bees is a substitute made by the beekeeper or bought from a supplier.

There are times when bees can use additional pollen. Some beekeepers think that bees need pollen going into winter. Some believe it is only necessary coming out of winter if there aren’t many pollen-bearing flowers available. This can be during spring build-up while the bees are coming out of winter and the queen is laying brood.

If feeding pollen early in the winter, you should choose a supplement that is lower in protein that won’t encourage egg laying. You want to wait until spring for the queen to start increasing colony size. Suppliers have both winter pollen substitute – “winter patties” and springtime brood builder patties.

Honey Bee Feeding Equipment

There are feeders for different seasons and even there you have choices for the ones you will use in your apiary. I’m going to talk about them from the small hobby beekeeper standpoint.

Types of feeders:

top feeder/Miller feeder
frame feeder
in hive feeder
Boardman feeder
candy board
external feeder

Everyone has their favorite feeders and that may be because of personal experience or because that’s what they were shown first and they still use them.

Top feeders, also called Miller feeders, sit on top of the top brood box. On the outside, the feeder looks like a smaller brood box. On the inside it is divided into a box on each side that will hold syrup. Between the syrup boxes is space for the bees to come up from the brood box and into the feeder.

The inside of the top feeder can vary. It may have a wooden raft that floats on top of the syrup, so the bees have a place to stand while eating. There may be an arch of screen over the space and into the syrup that the bees can walk on.

The advantage of top feeders is that you can add syrup without opening up the top of the brood boxes and disturbing the bees.

This is the kind we use. This spring we’re going to shift to the top feeders with the plastic inserts. We found that the all wooden ones can leak, despite what we thought was thorough caulking.

Frame feeders replace two frames in the brood box with a feeder that holds up to four gallons of syrup. There are screened ladders into the feeder that the bees can use to get to the syrup. You do have to open up the top brood box to refill these feeders.

In hive feeders, which we haven’t used, use containers that are filled with syrup, inverted, and placed on the inner cover over the open vent above the top hive body. To protect them and the colony, put on a deep to surround it and then put on the top cover. Depending on the size, the containers can be very heavy to lift after you have refilled them.

Boardman feeders are hive entrance feeders, using a glass or plastic jar to hold syrup. We prefer to use these for water during the dry season. Having a feeder at the hive entrance can encourage robbing by other bees and can attract yellow jackets.

Candy boards have a funny name and they aren’t boards. These hold winter fondant or sugar cakes. They are short wooden boxes that sit on the top winter deep. The bottom is hardware cloth that the bees can either reach through to get at the sugar or fit through to climb on the sugar cakes.

External feeders or open-air feeders are away from the hives. These feeders are used for spring and fall syrup feeding. Commercial apiaries will use barrels to feed massive amounts of syrup. I don’t know about commercial bee yards, but in the small apiary, these can cause fighting amongst the bees and can attract other insects and bees from other apiaries, which may be carrying diseases.

How Does a Beehive Work – Parts of a Beehive

You can buy a lot of different pieces when you’re setting a beehive. After seeing a local hive with the bottom board upside down and the slatted board in a wrong place, I was glad we learned where and why the boxes stack up as they do.

How does a beehive work? The hive sits on a base. The bees enter through the bottom board. A slatted rack provides ventilation and a place for foragers to rest. Bees build wax comb in brood boxes for baby bees, honey and pollen. An inner cover goes over the brood boxes and a top cover protects from the weather. Additional equipment includes honey supers, candy boards, quilt boxes, queen excluders, mite boards, and entrance reducers.

As a hobbyist beekeeper, you can collect a lot of pieces of hive equipment. Read on for an explanation of the basic ones you’ll be using if you are using a Langstroth beehive.

Hive Equipment

There are fifteen basic pieces that you’ll be using if you stay with beekeeping for very long. The first nine are in order from the ground up. Following that are the seasonal pieces you’ll be using.

Hive Stand
Bottom Board – screened, solid
Entrance Reducers/Mouse Guards
Sticky Board
Slatted Rack
Hive Body / Brood Boxes and Frames
Inner Cover
Top / Outer Cover

And more equipment:

Honey Supers – metal frame spacers (8 or 9)
Queen Excluder
Escape Screen / Fume Board
Candy Board
Quilt Boxes/Moisture Boxes
Robbing Screen
Feeders

Hive Stand

You want to keep your hives off the ground, so you need a hive stand.

The main bee equipment suppliers have various types of stands available, but this is one area you can be creative.

What you want in a stand is something that:

keeps your hives off the ground
is stable and will hold over 100 pounds of weight
can be leveled

Among our bee friends, no two have the same type of stands. One uses concrete blocks. One has treated 4”x4”s attached with brackets to concrete post bases. Another built square bases out of treated 4”x4” s. We began with and still use repurposed sections of our old picket fence, raised off the ground on patio blocks.

Your hives should be level from side to side. You will want to tilt the hives, so the front is slightly lower than the back, which helps with drainage during rainy weather.

Bottom Board

The bottom board sits directly on top of the base. It provides landing space for the bees flying back to the hive and is the main entrance to the hive.

Bottom boards are made of wood and now you can find them made of plastic. No matter the material, you will need to clean the bottom out. The plastic bottom boards have posts in between snap out sections of entrance reducers. These make it more difficult to clean.

Two other options you’ll find for bottom boards are to have screened or solid. The solid ones keep out drafts. The screened ones allow ventilation and allow varroa mites and hive debris to drop through. We used screened bottom boards for both of those reasons.

Our bottom boards also have a slot to slide in a mite board. (see below) Make sure there is enough room behind your hive to insert and remove the mite boards. Don’t back your hives up against a fence.

Entrance Reducers/Mouse Guards

Entrance reducers go in front of the entrance on the bottom board.

You’ll come across a couple of types of entrance reducers and mouse guards. There are both wooden and metal ones. Either will work well. We use metal because our first hives came with them included. They work well, so we’ve continued to use them.

Reducers give you the ability to close off the entrance entirely. You may want to do this if you are moving a hive or using an oxalic acid mite treatment.

You can also limit access to the hive, hence the name entrance reducer. This is handy during honey robbing season. You can keep out aggressive bees from other colonies, wasps, yellow jackets and hornets.

A mouse guard may be screen mesh you use along with your wooden entrance reducer, or just the flip side of a metal one. Mice like to stay in warm hives over the winter. They can cause a real mess if allowed in.

Sticky Board

A sticky board is also called a mite board.

It is a white plastic rectangle that is slid under the screened bottom board. The stickiness comes from sticky paper or from a quick spray of kitchen baking pan spray.

These are used when you want to do a varroa mite count to check on the health of your bee colony and to see if you need to do a mite treatment. You can also reduce ventilation to the hive by putting in the sticky board.

Slatted Rack

The slatted rack goes on top of the bottom board. It has a frame that fits on top of the bottom board and has vertical slats running across it. We use them, but not all hives have them.

Slatted racks give added room for ventilation. In the winter they are an additional space between the cold air coming in the entrance and the bees clustering for warmth in the hive bodies above. And, foragers will rest on them at night if the boxes are getting short on space.

Hive Bodies/Brood Boxes And Frames

The boxes the bees live in are called hive bodies or brood boxes. This is where the bees make their wax comb, the queen lays eggs, the brood emerges as young worker bees, and the bees store honey and pollen.

In Langstroth hives these boxes contain frames – rectangular wooden frames that hold “foundation” – a sheet of beeswax or wax coated plastic that the bees build wax comb on. There are plenty of reasons for using either type of foundation. We particularly like the coated plastic foundation in black because we both can see eggs. We can’t see them at all (without a magnifying glass) on white foundation or on beeswax.

Boxes come in two different types of sizes. One has to do with the number of frames it holds, and the other has to do with its depth.

Langstroth hives hold 8 frames or 10 frames. The difference will be in the width of the hive bodies. You can’t mix and match 8 and 10 frame boxes. They just won’t fit together. The other hive equipment you use will be made for either 8 or 10 frames sizes. If you choose to 8-frame box, every box has to be the same. You cannot mix and match with a 10-frame.

The three sizes, based on the depth of the boxes are ‘deeps’ (9 5/8”), ‘westerns’ or mediums (6 5/8”), and shallows (5 11/16”). Shallows are specialty boxes and can be used for honey or as the basis for quilt boxes or to cover in-hive feeders.

If you use mediums/westerns for your hive boxes and for honey supers, all your frames are interchangeable. Also, the hive bodies will weigh about 2/3 less than deeps.

When we got our hives, we went with deeps, not thinking about the weight or the ability to take frames from honey supers and put them into the brood boxes. If we were beginning all over again, we might consider having all western sizes. Hindsight is wonderful!

Inner Cover

The inner cover goes right on top of the hive bodies.

It is a thin piece of plywood or Masonite that covers the top and has a ventilation hole in the center.

When you take off the top cover, you don’t immediately encounter all your bees. You have the inner cover.

There are several reasons to use an inner cover, though not everyone uses an inner cover all the time.

It provides “bee space” on top of the hive body, so the bees can move around on the top of the frames in the top brood box.

We were told that one of the primary functions of the inner cover around here is to prevent the bees from sticking the top to the hive body with propolis. Instead, they glue the inner cover, which is much easier to break loose and to clean.

If it has a notch in the top edge, the bees can use that as another entrance/exit to the hive.

It is said that an inner cover helps with ventilation for the hive, though I haven’t figured out how that works.

For moisture control in the winter, we remove the inner cover and use quilt boxes.

Top/Outer Cover

The top cover is what the name says. It goes on top. It’s the roof that keeps the weather out and protects the top of the hive.

No matter which type of outer cover you use, always put a weight on top to keep them from blowing off in a strong wind. One of our club members told of losing a hive when he was away for a blustery, wet weekend and had forgotten to weigh down the lid. His bees got rained on and died of the cold and damp.

We use patio bricks on all our covers. Others use regular bricks, decorative concrete bricks or rocks.

There are several types of hive covers, fancy ones and ordinary ones. These are the three standard ones most of us around here use.

Telescoping Metal

This is a wooden cover that fits down over the top of the hive box underneath it, hence the name ‘telescoping’.

It often is covered in metal to make it more resistant to the weather. Beekeepers say they are a good cover in winter weather.

Migratory

Migratory covers are a flat piece of wood with a lip on the front and back that hook over the edge of the top box.

These are good if you are going to be transporting your hives because hives can be put up snug next to each other and they can be stacked. They are used by commercial beekeepers who transport hives for pollination.

They are not as good as a telescoping cover in cold and snowy winter climates.

Ultimate Hive Cover

The Ultimate Hive Cover by Bee Smart® is the brand name for a cover made from techno polymer. We pretty much just call them plastic covers.

Not to sound too much like an advertisement, it is lightweight, doesn’t need painting, won’t rot, allows ventilation, and had double wall construction which is supposed to help with hot and cold temperature insulation.

All our hives have these covers.

And More Equipment

Honey Supers

Honey supers are the hive boxes that you stack on top of the brood boxes. The name super is because they are superimposed on the hive.

Once the bees have filled the lower boxes with brood and honey, they will move up into the honey supers. Beekeepers feel they can harvest from the supers once the bees have adequate winter storage in the lower boxes. These can be stacked several supers high. If there are strong nectar flows, the bees will fill them.

You will probably want the next item if you are using honey supers.

Queen Excluder

The queen excluder is a plastic mesh or metal bars that have gaps big enough to allow worker bees through, but the queen and drones are too big to pass through. With the excluder in place, the queen can’t lay eggs in the honeycomb.

Metal queen excluders come with or without a wooden frame. They sit directly on the top hive body.

There is a bit of debate and joking about how effective excluders are. Some beekeepers call them bee excluders because their bees don’t like to go through them. Others find that their bees go through the excluders with no problem. Our bees have been repelled by the excluders and have gone right through them. For us the effectiveness is at the whim of the bee.

Escape Screen / Fume Board

When you are ready to harvest your honey, you need to get the bees out of the honey supers. Two common and easy ways to do it are the escape screen and the fume board.

The escape screen goes on below the honey supers and above the hive body. It is an ingenious device that has a triangular maze for the bees to get through so they can get out but not get back in.

You need to put this on toward the end of the day. The bees will be exiting the honey supers and going back into the main hive for night time. The next day the honey super will have at most a couple of bees in it.

Do not leave the escape screen on more than a day. Give the girls 24 hours to figure out the maze and they will be back up in the honey supers. We have used escape screens and they are magic! They really do work as they’re supposed to.

Fume boards differ from escape screens in that they drive the bees out of the honey supers. The board goes on top of the honey supers. The solid board has a cloth underside that you spray with a non-toxic bee repellant. It will clear the supers within 5-10 minutes.

We haven’t tried a fume board, but friends of ours have and it works well for them.

Candy Board

The candy board holds winter sugar feed for the bees.

A candy board isn’t really a board. It is a box with a wire mesh bottom that the bees can crawl through. It sits on top of the top brood box in winter.

Quilt Box/Moisture Box

A quilt box doesn’t hold quilts. Its purpose is to soak up moisture in the hive to prevent the bees from getting damp in cold weather.

This is a box with a cloth/burlap bottom or cloth and a wire mesh bottom that is the top box in the winter. It will sit on top of the top hive box or, if you are feeding your bees, on the candy board.

The box is filled with material that will absorb water. We use hamster bedding. Some people use old burlap bags. It is something that must be checked through the winter and replaced with dry material when required.

Robbing Screen

From August through October, there is a danger of bees from strong colonies raiding honey stores from weaker hives. Yellow jackets and hornets will also try to get into your beehives.

A robbing screen covers the hive entrance.

Bees who live in the hive can find their way out and back in again. For some reason, raider insects don’t seem to be able to figure out how to get into the screen. They congregate on the outside of the screen opposite the entrance of the hive.

We haven’t used robbing screens yet. Using entrance reducers has been adequate for our hives to date.

Feeders

Besides the candy board, there is a variety of feeders. Most go directly on top of the brood boxes.

Top feeders and Miller feeders are boxes the size of hive bodies that have trays to feed sugar syrup.

Frame feeders go into the top hive body, taking the place of two frames. They hold up to four gallons of syrup.

In hive feeders are containers holding syrup that are inverted over the hole in the inner cover.

Boardman feeders are attached outside of the hive at the hive entrance.

For more discussion on each of these feeders, see our article When Should I Feed My Bees.

How Long Will A Bee Hive Last?

We could be talking bees and queen bees here, but I’ll stick to hive equipment.

Although you can buy hive bodies made from cedar, most people use boxes made of pine. It’s readily available and it is economical. You’ll also find different grades of pine to choose from, select, commercial, or budget grade lumber. The difference in price can be considerable, so go with your budget.

You can paint your woodenware or you can treat it with sealant. You’ll also see other methods, using linseed oil mixed with beeswax or various other ingredients.

Whatever method you choose, only treat the outside of your boxes and equipment. Fumes from the treatment can be toxic to your bees if you do the inside of the boxes.

What we have done with our wooden equipment is to prime it with Zinsser, a water-based, mold killing primer. We paint a couple of coats of exterior latex over the top. A small roller works great, using a brush for touching up and reaching odd areas like under the handles.

If we see that the paint is slightly damaged or peeling, we’ll do a quick touch-up while the bees are occupying the hives.

The boxes should last a decade or more if they’re being maintained.

When Is Beekeeping Season

We took our first beekeeping course was from February through May. It finished just in time for beekeeping season. We found out that beekeeping season is a lot longer than we thought.

When is beekeeping season? Most beekeepers will get new bees and queen bees in early spring, but beekeeper work lasts from late winter through late fall with a few hive checks during the winter time.

There is more to the beekeeping year than getting new bees in the spring, it is a year-round activity. Keep reading for more.

Is There A Season For Bees?

As we quickly learned, there are different many different seasons within the beekeeping year, and the new beekeeping year doesn’t begin on January 1.

Late Winter

The bees are staying in the hive in a tight cluster for warmth, making occasional cleansing flights on warm sunny days.

For most beekeepers, the year begins in late winter when beekeepers wonder how their colonies made it through the winter. There is no exact date for this. You can check the weight of the hives and feed or continue to feed sugar cakes if your bees appear to be light on food. Clean dead bees and debris from the screened bottom board to improve ventilation.

Early Spring

When the days begin to be warm and sunny, the bees will start flying and foraging for nectar and pollen.

When the weather temperature is in the 50’s, it is time to make full hive inspections. Check for brood and for the queen. Are there honey stores; is there still stored pollen. If the bottom box is empty, there is no brood there at all, and all of the bees are in the top, reverse the brood boxes, putting the top box on the bottom. If the weather is getting warmer and is in the 50’s, begin to feed 1:1 sugar syrup (1 pound of sugar:1 pint of water). This is the time to order more bees or replacement queens.

Spring

The bees are foraging in earnest now. The queen should be laying her 1-2000 eggs per day. Colonies are building populations.

This is the season, if you have ordered them, when your bee packages, nucs, and queens will arrive. Time to put the girls into their hives and to feed everyone if the nectar flow hasn’t started. It is an excellent time to treat your hives for mites. This is also the season for swarms. Keep an eye on the colonies and try to divide hives that give indications of swarming. You might catch a swarm if you are lucky. Even luckier if the one you catch is a swarm that has just flown from one of your hives.

Early Summer

Bee colonies are increasing in size.

This is the season to keep an eye on your colonies with weekly inspections. You should be done feeding the girls by now. You want to be sure the queens are laying well and that the large colonies are not showing signs of wanting to swarm. This is an excellent time to combine weak hives with strong ones or split one robust colony into two. If the bees are filling the brood chambers with brood, honey and pollen, add a honey super to give them room.

Summer

The hive in in full swing. Bees are foraging and producing honey.

This should be the time of year when you can enjoy your beehives if the weather is good and there is an abundance of forage plants. Add honey supers to your hives. Continue to mite checks every few weeks and to treat your hives if necessary. Keep an eye on your queens to be sure they are healthy and have a strong laying pattern. Look for signs of swarming. Also look for signs of robbing by yellow jackets and hornets. This is the time to put robbing screens over the entrances.

Honey Harvesting Season

Most of us hobby beekeepers here in the Pacific Northwest harvest honey in August or early September. Take off the honey supers and collect the frames after using fume boards or bee escapes to remove the bees. Extract the honey on a warm day and be sure to do it in an enclosed place that the bees can’t get to. If you don’t you’ll have hundreds of bees helping with your honey extraction. Now is the time to do another mite treatment.

August Dearth

The bees may begin to consume their own honey stores if there is a serious dearth.

A nectar dearth is when flowers dry, many bloom less, and there is very little nectar for the bees to harvest. If the bees have used the honey stores in their brood boxes or have placed their honey in the honey supers, it is time to begin feeding again. Keep an eye on your weather and be aware of whether a summer dearth is standard for your region of the country.

Fall Management

Bees are storing for winter. This may include robbing honey from weaker hives.

Fall is also a robbing season. Other bees as well as yellow jackets and hornets will happily destroy a colony to get to the honey. The bees may be very active, but this is the time to give them a boost with 2:1 sugar syrup as they prepare for winter. If you didn’t medicate in August, now is the time to do it. Varroa mite population peak in late October and September so the hives so you want your hives to have a low mite count going into the winter months.

Late Fall

Bees will be staying in the hive more and more as the weather stays below 50 degrees.

This is the time to prepare you girls for winter. If moisture is a problem in your area, put quilt boxes on now. Combine weak hives. You may want to replace weak queen so you’ll have a healthy queen for spring. Clean up the apiary and put on your mouse guards. In cold winter regions you may want to put some sort of insulating material around the hives. Use a luggage scale to get a rough idea of the weight of your hives. This will give you an idea of the honey stores for each colony.

Winter In the Apiary

During the cold season, the bees form a cluster in the hive and the queen generally doesn’t lay any eggs.

If your bees foraged well and if you fed during the fall, there might be enough honey in your hives to get the bees through the winter. Check the weight of the hives at intervals through the winter. If they are getting much lighter, you will need to begin feeding solid sugar or sugar cakes. It would be much better if the bees had enough winter stores of their own, but winter feeding is better than losing the colony.

What Time of Year Do You Get Bees?

Most bees are bought in the early spring because this is when the queens resume laying eggs after the winter break. The colonies start to build up their populations. Foragers make orientation flights and then begin to bring back nectar and pollen stores to the hive. What date all of this happens depends upon the weather.

Queens can be purchased through the summer and into the fall.Often packages from big suppliers are sold out after the spring season. It may be possible to get nucs, splits or swarms from other local beekeepers during the summer months.

When Should I Start Keeping Bees?

When to start keeping bees doesn’t have the simple answer that you might expect. The first answer is easy.

It is best to set up your apiary in the spring. That way the bees have a chance to build a thriving colony and can build up stores to tide them over when winter arrives.

The second answer, what we consider the best one to “when should I” question is that you should wait until you have had a chance to learn about being a beekeeper. Many bee clubs, some suppliers, and some online sites have beekeeping courses that you should take before deciding to have bees. If there is a local bee club, become a member, go to meetings and become friends with the members. Try to find a mentor. By taking these steps, the chances are that you will enjoy your beekeeping experiences more and that your bees will have a much better chance of survival.

What Month To Harvest Honey?

The traditional time for honey harvest is late summer and early fall. In some regions there is a heavy nectar flow in plants that make honey that we consider particularly desirable in flavor. Fresh honey supers will be put on the hives so the nectar is kept separate from any other nectar flows of the year, and then this honey will be collected when it has been processed by the bees. Chestnut honey, Italian honey which is a favorite of mine, is an example of this. It is harvested in June and July. A beekeeper in our local club collects spring maple honey from one of the first nectar flows of the year.

Where Do Bees Go In The Fall?

Unlike birds who migrate or some insects which die out in the fall and winter, bees stay home in the fall. They go about their regular business of foraging for nectar and pollen and raising brood. In fact, the fall is a particularly busy time for bees. They are building up their food stores for winter.

Can You Start A Beehive In The Fall?

You can start a beehive in the fall, but the chances of it surviving through the winter are slim. For a bee colony to set up a hive, they need to draw comb and to make enough honey and pollen stores to get them through the winter. In the springtime when we set up a new hive of bees, we think in terms of weeks for the girls to get their hive to the stage where they fully set.

Related Questions

What time of year do honey bees swarm?

Bees swarm when they feel over crowded in their hive. Most swarms occur in late spring to early summer. Fewer swarms will occur during the summer, and outlier swarms may happen in the fall.

What temperature is too cold for bees?

In the winter, bees can handle freezing weather. They cluster in a ball in their hive and generate enough heat to keep the temperature in the 70’s at the edge of the cluster and up to 95 degrees in the middle of the cluster where the queen is. They will make quick cleansing flights, the bee version of a potty break, during the winter on a warmer sunny day.

During the rest of the year, bees do not like to fly unless the temperature is in the 50’s. When the temperatures are lower than 50 degrees, the bees get too cold to fly back to the hive.

What Happens When a Queen Bee Dies

We haven’t had a queen bee die in our apiary (except when I killed one intentionally), but we have collected three swarms that were without queens. They are not the same as a colony that has a queen and would have died away if we hadn’t intervened.

What happens when a queen bee dies? The queen is the only bee in a colony who can lay female eggs. When a queen dies, the worker bees immediately select several newly laid eggs, feeding them and enlarging the wax brood cells to create new queen bees. If a new queen is not created, the colony dies out because there are no replacement bees to continue the population.

Here’s more detail of the many interesting things that happen in a colony that becomes queen-less.

What Happens After A Queen Bee Dies?

As soon as a queen dies, the pheromones she releases into the hive dissipate.

Her scent tells all 50,000 – 80,000 bees that all is well with the colony: eggs are being laid and the queen is strong. When that scent weakens and goes, the worker bees go into action.

Several recently laid eggs are selected to become potential new queens for the hive. They must be eggs that are no older than three days old. All bee eggs are fed royal jelly for three days. After the first three days, only the queen eggs continue to be fed royal jelly. All others are fed bee bread, which is a combination of pollen, honey, and bee saliva. It is the phenolic acids from the pollen that prevent the ovaries of the worker bees from developing and them from becoming queens.

The brood cells of the potential queens are enlarged. They become what is known as queen cells. Regular brood cells have very gently rounded caps and are almost flat. A queen cell will be about an inch long and stands out from the rest of the wax comb.

To learn more about how a queen is created, read our article How Does A Queen Bee Become a Queen.

Can A Bee Hive Survive Without A Queen?

A colony without a queen won’t survive.

A colony with no queen to replace the dead queen and lay eggs will die away.

The worker bees themselves don’t die because the queen dies. They live their typical lifespan, but after the last of the eggs laid by the queen have emerged as bees, there are none to replace them and continue the colony.

A hive without a queen is an unhappy hive. Our mentor told us that you can tell by listening to the hum that a colony that isn’t “queen right”. Much to our surprise, we could tell the difference.

A “queen right” hive is one that has a queen that is a good egg layer and who has strong pheromones. A queen right hive buzzes contentedly. One that isn’t queen right has a louder, more upset buzzing sound. Sounds silly, but wait until you hear it for yourself.

Can A Worker Bee Become A Queen?

No bee except one raised to be a queen can become a queen.

If there is no queen and there are no fertile eggs to make into queens, worker bees will begin to lay infertile eggs.

One of our first two hives had a queen that for some reason, wasn’t bred. The worker bees buzzed unhappily and began laying eggs themselves. It’s easy to tell that a queen is no longer laying in a colony and that the workers have taken over. Because none of the workers are fertile, they can lay only drone (male bee) eggs. Drone brood comb is very obvious. It can be identified by the very tall, rounded caps on the brood cells.

How Long Can A Bee Hive Be Queenless?

A colony can be queenless for quite a while.

Assuming that a queen cell has been made, this is the timeline for a new queen to take over queenly duties.

A queen emerges from her cell after sixteen days.

She then takes a few days, perhaps a week, to mature before leaving the hive on her mating flights. She may take four or five days for mating flights.

Then for a day or two, all of the sperm she has collected moves from the oviducts into a storage receptacle known as the spermatatheca.

Then the queen can begin laying eggs.

Adding those days together, from the time an egg is laid until a new queen will begin laying, can be four weeks. And, if the weather is rainy or below 70 degrees when the queen is ready for her mating flights, there will be more delay.

What Happens If There Is No Queen Bee In A Hive?

Here’s a little story of what we did with one of the queen-less swarms we collected.

These bees had taken up residence in some empty hive boxes that were stashed next to our friend Jim’s garage. We knew they were queen-less because there was no brood except drone brood. Just to be sure, we did inspect for a queen, but there was none.

Since Jim wasn’t set up to have bees yet, we brought the swarm back to our apiary.

At the suggestion of our mentor, we took a frame from one of our thriving hives to put into what we named “Jim’s Hive”. The frame had brood, larvae, nurse bees, and, most important, eggs. Immediately the buzzing of the hive changed to the happy hum of a contented beehive. That was amazing and very gratifying. All of the nurse bees were happily accepted.

We left the hive alone for five days to give the bees a chance to create queen cells. That didn’t happen, so we added another frame with eggs. We still had happy bees, but they built no queen cells.

After adding yet another frame and finding no queen cells, we finally combined “Jim’s Hive” with another queen-less swarm and introduced a fully grown, mated queen that we had bought from a honey bee breeder. Happily, both hives combined, accepted the new queen, and are thriving as a single hive (now named Brewer).

What Happens If I Kill The Queen Bee?

With any luck, you won’t kill any of your queens accidentally.

If you are beekeepers for very long, there will be times when you will kill your queens intentionally.

A prevailing theory among beekeepers is that a young queen has stronger pheromones and has a better egg laying pattern. Because of this belief, every two years they kill the existing queen and replace her with a new one.

The new queen will be introduced to the hive in a queen cage, where she will stay for between three and seven days, depending on the beekeeper. That gives the bee colony time to adjust to the new queen pheromones and to accept her as their new queen.

We had to replace a queen in one of our first two hives within two weeks of installing the packages. We gave the bees a chance to acclimate with the queen, to begin building comb, and the queen to begin laying. When we checked the frames, we saw beautiful comb, drone cells and three beautiful queen cells of the type known as supersedure cells. These are in the middle of a frame rather than on the bottom and they indicate that the workers are not happy with the queen and are going to replace her. We had a virgin queen who wasn’t laying fertile eggs.

The only thing to do to guarantee the life of the hive was to kill the queen and replace her. Thank goodness for YouTube videos. Beheading a queen wasn’t a fun task during our first month of beekeeping.

The hive survived and thrived with the new queen.

What Happens When A Queen Bee Leaves The Hive?

A queen bee will leave the hive when the worker bees have decided it is time to swarm.

This is a planned event. The workers will have already begun to make queen cells. You’ll see these along the bottom of the frames in your hives. They look like peanuts hanging down from the comb. This is a significant signal that your girls are planning to swarm and you should take appropriate action.

The queen doesn’t fly anymore since her mating flights. The workers stop feeding her as much and begin to force her to move around inside the hive. Essentially, they are getting her in shape to fly away with two-thirds of the bees in the colony.

On a signal that is unknown to us, the mass of bees flows out of the nest, sweeping the queen along in their wake.

The colony has already taken steps to ensure its survival be creating baby queens to take the old queen’s place.

Related Questions

Is there a king bee?

There is no king bee. The only male bees in a colony are the drones.

Do queen bees mate with their sons and does a male bee die after mating?

An unbred or virgin queen makes several mating flights to a nearby Drone Congregation Area. This is a place where drones, male bees, from several different colonies hang out. This guarantees that the queen will mate with bees from outside of her own hive. The queen is inseminated by several drones, who die immediately afterward, on each mating flight.

How long does a queen bee live?

A queen bee can live to be five years old.

Are there different types of honey bees?

Yes. There are different varieties of honey bees, generally named for the region they originally came from.

The types generally found in North America are Italians, Caucasians, Russians, Carniolans. To change the type of bee in your hive, put in a queen of a different variety.