Bee Bee Qute, LLC

Our Apiary

six bee colonies are visible, sitting on elevated wooden frames. there are trees and grass.

Here's our small apiary. We generally have between three and six colonies at any given time.

Capped Honey

a frame from a beehive. it's full of honey. the cells of the honeycomb are capped with wax

This is a fully capped frame of honey. The bees have filled each cell in the honeycomb with nectar from flowers. They've dehydrated the syrup until it's more than 80% sugar and less than 20% water. In this super-sugary environment pests cannot survive. Once the bees are happy with it, they cap it with a wax "lid". Sometimes you might find a small amount of this wax in jars of our honey. We strain our honey to remove most of the wax cappings, but occasionally one or two fall through.

Open Brood

a frame from a beehive. the honeycomb is visible, bees cover the surface. in some honeycomb cells white C shapes are visible. these are growing bee larvae.

Bee colonies are usually broken into two sections. The first is the broodnest - this is where the Queen lives and makes her baby bees with the help of her workers. This is a frame from a broodnest. Look for small "C" shapped larvae inside the honeycomb cells. These larvae come from eggs that were laid about five days prior.

Open Brood (Zoom)

a section of honeycomb is visible, about 12x16 cells. some bees are visible on the surface. the cells contain larvae and eggs at various development stages. the larvae look like little Cs floating in a whitish pool of royal jelly, the first food that bees consume.

Here's a zoomed-in view of open brood. You can see very young larvae all the way through mature larvae that are soon to pupate. Notice that the small larvae are all swimming in an off-white pool of fluid. This is the first food that bees eat, and its provided to them by the worker bees walking around on the comb.

Capped Brood

a movable frame from a beehive. here the honeycomb is visible, and bees are moving about the surface. these cells are capped with brown wax cappings. these cappings look different from the honey cappings, more like little domes of a darker color. beneath them lie bee pupae.

Open brood eventually matures and the larvae inside pupate. When this occurs other bees in the colony cap the cell to give the young bee time to mature. Underneath each of these golden brown cells is a bee larvae. Judging based on the color of the cappings they'll likely hatch in a few days.

Swarm!

The inside arms of an avocado tree are visible. Clustered around the arms of the tree is a big ball of bees, about the size of a basketball.

When bee colonies are ready to reproduce they send out swarms. Swarms are made up of a few pounds of worker bees, and generally one queen bee. They will settle in a tree while some of them look for a more permanent home.