Wednesday, January 26, 2005
BEEHIVES IN THE BEEYARD
The closest beehive was a swarm which I caught outside the beeyard and managed to put into an empty hive box. Each hive is home to one queen, about three hundred drones and about thirty to fifty thousand worker bees. If you walk into the beeyard, expect to meet a few bees as they will bounce off you...only beekeepers or folks with nerves of steel wander into a beeyard. Not much of a chance that anyone will streak through the bee yard.
A beehive is composed of a series of bottomless and topless boxes in which are found frames which hold the comb. These boxes are called supers and will be either brood boxes or honey supers. The bottom one or two boxes will hold the brood and the boxes above them will be honey supers. Between the brood boxes and honey supers is placed a metal screen which is called a queen excluder; its job is to keep the queen below it in the brood boxes. We do not want the queen to go into the honey supers and lay eggs there; she does this in the brood boxes.
# posted by Ed Gagnon : 6:38 PM
