Break On Through (To The Other Side)

What exciting occurrence is pictured below?It's the emergence of worker bees—the next generation. In the shot above, you can see three different cells being chewed open by bees preparing to enter the world. Today, while working in Hive Orange, I had the privilege of witnessing this emergence for the first time. I'd seen drones make their exit before, but never the workers.

Below, you can see one girl almost finished chewing her way out. Beside her, another worker is just beginning to break on through (to the other side). Below these cells is a recently vacated cell; note the ragged, chewed-out edge. Also, see how fuzzy the fully emerged bees are? These are very likely newly emerged bees whose first assignment upon leaving the cell is to clean it so it can be re-purposed for storing new eggs, pollen, or nectar. Here's a closeup of a worker chewing her way out.
A worker's first few weeks of life are devoted to "house duties": cleaning cells, attending to the queen, feeding the larvae, producing wax and shaping it into comb, capping the nectar once it transmutes to honey, etc. Later, she'll move on to guard duty toward the front of the hive and ultimately, she'll become a field bee foraging for nectar.

What must it feel like to be a honeybee, newly emerging as a winged being, eying the world for the first time? Of course, most bees are born in darkness deep within the brood-nest of the hive. I guess you could say this girl was lucky, born into a nice view of mountain green and summer-blue sky. By the time she's ready for her first forays out of the hive a few weeks from now, the mountains will be stippled with the colors of autumn.

Complete Metamorphosis—The Video

A quick primer on the honeybee lifecycle.

A Tour of the Hive

Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the bee yard to confirm that the (previously) virgin queens had mated and were laying "the next generation" in Hive Orange and Green Hive, both of which swarmed on June 21, taking with them the old queens and leaving newly raised, virgin queens behind. I was pleased to find plenty of evidence that all was well, reproduction-wise, in both hives. Here's a quick tour of what I found. (Click the photos to view them in a larger format.)

In these two combs, you see just what a beekeeper hopes to find: plenty of capped worker brood—the cells covered by the tan-colored, porous-looking caps in the middle of the comb. Notice that these capped cells form a nice pattern filling in the majority of cells in the the comb. This is suggestive of a good queen who has laid each of her eggs in a efficient pattern along the comb. Bordering the top of the comb, the bees store nectar (note the pale or yellowish uncapped cells) and capped honey (whitish caps).

Below that are some dark, uncapped cells in which pollen is being stored. Both food sources—honey for carbs, pollen for protein—are conveniently located above the brood cells to make it easier for the nurse bees to mix "bee bread" (pollen + nectar/honey) to feed the larvae numerous times a day over a period of several days. During this time, the larvae grow at a rapid rate. Once they are ready to morph into the winged creature we know as the honeybee, the cell is capped and the magical rearrangement of the bee's molecular biology begins.

Here you see larvae being fed and attended to by nurse bees. You also see some capped cells inside of which are larvae undergoing metamorphosis.

Once the bees have built out enough combs for a nice, big broodnest, they start building honeycombs—combs with larger cells for storing honey and pollen that will be used during times of dearth and, of course, during wintertime when nothing's blooming and it's too cold for the bees to fly. The dark cells in this lovely bee-composition contain pollen. Along the top and upper-middle right is capped honey. There are also some as-yet empty cells and cells containing uncapped nectar.

After the bees bring nectar into the hive and deposit it in the cells, it takes some time (and effort on the bees' part—mainly through the fanning of their wings) to reduce the moisture level to the point where it becomes honey. Once it does, the bees cap the cell with wax, keeping the precious substance clean and protected for future use. As William Longgood observes in his great book The Queen Must Die, "To the bee, honey is the ultimate reality."

Here's a closeup of the pollen, capped honey, and open cells. By the way, the pollen colors vary enormously as different plants come into bloom and are visited by the bees. I can't be sure, but I suspect this pollen is from white clover.

When I look at a closeup like this—and every time I visit the hive and watch how hard the bees are working—I can't help but think about how many dozens of trips by dozens of bees it takes to fill a single cell with honey or pollen. Truly, every teaspoon of honey and every grain of pollen represents a herculean effort on the part of the honeybees.
And that's leaving aside the genius of the comb itself...

If these wings could talk...

Like everything in nature, a honeybee colony has its moods. Here’s a sad one: a weathered worker bee in her final hours. See those tattered wings? She flew to the breaking point to scout out forage locations and gather pollen and nectar to support her colony’s survival. She probably arrived with the original package of bees trucked up to the Catskills from Georgia back in mid-April. She survived that harrowing trip, the rough hiving courtesy of this totally inexperienced beekeeper, and a week of cold weather and heavy snow. She was one of the originals—clustering to keep the all-important, egg-laying queen warm; building the comb on which the queen would deposit her eggs; then taking wing to venture into a totally unfamiliar new habitat to find the sustenance that would carry the colony toward summer and beyond. So much achieved in a lifespan of a just few short weeks. On the one hand, a life to be proud of. On the other hand, my heart goes out to her.