Wednesday 23 April 2014

close up view of RAW Honeybee POLLEN in a frame of brood foundation







Dear viewers,

A new video showing a closeup view of raw pollen from an Italian Honeybee, still in its frame of foundation. You can see the different colors and where it is generally stored in the hive itself. 



We removed this frame from one of our beehives where our queen managed to get away into the honey supers during our last inspection. It wasn't difficult to see there was a problem as soon as we opened the hive. For one, the bees were not as calm as they normally would be. They seemed overly excited. Once we removed the first frame for inspection, it was clear that we either had the queen in the honey super laying eggs, OR, possibly laying worker bees. The fact that there were hundreds upon hundreds of drones everywhere suggested the latter. We could see the eggs, the larvae and predominantly the capped drone cells. BUT, there were also worker bee cells, and the eggs were placed in the center and only one per cell. This suggested that perhaps the queen was still around and was laying well. So we had to remove several frames that were mainly drone brood, and moved the remaining worker cell brood back to the bottom brood chamber. Then the search continued to locate our lovely Italian Queen bee. If she has not been superseded, she should have been marked with a red dot. The entire hive had one brood box, steel queen excluder,  and 3 honey supers on top. So you can imagine how long this process took. 2 hours later, we finally located the queen, made sure she was migrated to the brood chamber, enclosed with the queen excluder, and then the honey supers were put back on top. However, as a result of the month or so the queen was in the upper honey supers, all the brood has hatched already, so we have removed half the empty frames, and replaced with new clean foundation frames. Thus the frame above was available for viewing, and so here it is. Now you know the story, and we can inspect what an empty frame of brood foundation looks like, still in tact with a ring of pollen, honey stores and the communication and ventilation holes.



As a matter of interest, you may also like to take a look at our Raw Propolis video. This is as RAW as propolis gets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znbIO6uTRME





We hope you enjoy this and all our other videos from our MahakoBees Youtube channel. If you enjoy our content, we invite you to subscribe, click the thumbs up, share or post your comments and feedback. We would love to hear from you. 



Have a great day.

MahakoBees



Music composed, performed and provided by Groovey - Adam Kubát a Pavel Křivák

You can visit their website on: http://www.groovey.cz/.