Happy Labor day to everyone!

I was sitting here thinking about our bees this evening and wondered what they would say to the idea of “taking a day off.”

After waking up from a exhilarating night of sleeping in a tent with all of the cubs, I wandered out back to check on my hive laborers. As usual, they were hard at work. In and out of the hive with nectar and pollen with no idea that they should be taking the day off to grill and relax because they deserve it. Bees really are an amazing insect as many of you know, but I’m sure some of you don’t realize the number of jobs that go on inside a hive.

The bees coming in and out are only a fraction of the workforce. The bees you see flying are collecting nectar and pollen to store inside of the hive. But what do they do with it? Well, it turns out that the “forager bee” will pass the nectar off to a “house bee” which converts the nectar to honey. The house bees then store the nectar inside of a cell in the hive to eventually be capped off and stored for later use. But there are many more jobs that must be done inside the hive. Jobs like making wax to build cells or cap them off, cleaning out cells for the queen to lay eggs in, tending to the larvae and brood, feeding the young, removing dead bees and of course tending to the Queen.

Lets not forget the Queen needs to lay about 1,500 eggs a day to keep the population up!

With everything that needs done, I have to think that a day off is not in the immediate future for our workers. Even though it has been raining most of the day and the bees are not flying in and out with their usual vigor, rest assured that there is plenty of work going on in there.

As for us…..
Movie time!