Bee Update - 5 May 2026

Bees Being Born!

Uncapped larvae cells (both worker and drone, drone cells being ‘taller’);

I may end up doing two bee updates this week. (And let’s face it, they’re much more soothing to both look at and listen to – the videos, I mean – than any commentary on the state of the world.)

In usual IT oddness, I can see about a third of the videos I took of each hive – and only a very few of the still photos. Luckily, I sent myself the BBB (Bees Being Born) video only minutes after I took it, to give myself the greatest chance of having it available to write about and share with you tonight.

Hive #1 is doing great.

There was very little if anything going on in the medium super I put on top of the large hive body last week. There were a few bees hanging around on each frame – and one frame had a little bit of comb built, but it was nothing to get excited about.

You may recall I described last week how I wanted to try ‘single hive body maintenance’ and put a queen excluder on top of the brood box so she wouldn’t go up and lay more eggs. The expectation when you do that (keep the queen from going up into higher boxes) is for the workers to just fill the upper box (aka ‘super’) with honey.

Well, the feeling I got from the bees today was that they are into building up the strength and numbers of their colony. Look at how gorgeous the abundance of capped brood looks on Frame 5 in the video below. Since the bees seem so singularly focused on building brood (and not necessarily putting away a bunch of honey in the honey super), I want to give them the opportunity to build as big and strong a colony as possible.

As a result Karl and I are thinking of removing the queen excluder/separator and putting another ‘deep’ on top of the bottom deep (hive box), in the hope that the queen just goes to town and fills the second one up with lots and lots of brood. If she does, I’ll then (eventually) place the queen excluder on top of the second deep, then add the medium super, and hope for some honey.

I’ll save my comments about Hives 2 and 3 for tomorrow night.

Paramount to my post this evening is for you to enjoy witnessing the birth of three bees! Technically, they’re not ‘babies,’ because as soon as they eat their way out of their cell, they’re capable of performing adult tasks. Actually, the first thing they do is become ‘house’ bees – a role in which they initially avoid light, eat pollen stores near them, and clean up the bottoms and sides of cells, as well as the nest.

You won’t be able to miss my excitement at actually noticing them starting to emerge. And honestly, I was so focused on trying to keep my eyes on the first one I noticed being born, even though her sisters kept walking over her repeatedly, I didn’t realize there were two others also being born quite close to her.

So when you watch the video, please take note at roughly the center of your screen, the three heads starting to poke their way out. You can also, hopefully, enlarge the image on your screen to get an even closer look.

I installed the two bee packages (Hives 1 and 2) on April 9^th. The earliest any bees would start to emerge from capped brood would be 21 days after the eggs were laid. Clearly, then, the queen in Hive 1 hit the ground running (so to speak). Huzzah!