Thursday, 17 January 2013
Capped Brood
When I wrote about the honey harvest I mentioned that capped honey looks different from capped brood. Here is a shot of a frame that is mainly brood. You can see that the capping is more papery, dull and brown. There is a bit of capped honey in the bottom left corner - those look a bit shinier and golden. You can also see how the brood cells tend to concentrate towards the bottom-centre of a frame and then arc out towards honey cells. That top right side of the frame is actually the bottom of the frame when it goes back into the box.
The wider cells are ones where drones emerged - these male bees are slightly larger than the female worker bees.
You can also see the queen in this shot - the queen has a much longer abdomen than the other female worker bees. Although this is an easy identifier, if you have 70,000 bees in a hive, it can be tough to find your queen so most beekeepers will put a paint spot on the thorax of their queen. Our queen has a yellow paint spot to make it easy to spot her. Many beekeepers will use a certain colour for each year so that they always know when that queen hatched and can keep track of her age.
Labels:
beekeeping,
bees,
brood,
brood frame,
queen
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