Whitwell Honey and Bees

23/06/2026

23/06/2026

Photos of the liquid wax being secreted and hardening on contact with the air. Female worker bees that are 12 to 18 days old are the only honey bees that are able to do this. Older bees lose this ability.

23/06/2026

Just to make you smile. The Lime trees (Linden trees) are flowering and you can smell the nectar! Come on bees get collecting it!

23/06/2026

This is the Welbeck Road swarm. Popped it into a box on the 20th June and on the 23rd June there are eggs! Woo hoo. A huge swarm with a mated queen. Happy days. I've treated it today with verroxsan to eliminate any mites hitching a ride on the bees from their previous home.

23/06/2026

Here's some wild comb on an empty frame. It's beautiful but I replaced this frame with a waxed frame for ease. This wax won't be wasted. It'll be melted down.

23/06/2026

Ooooooh I've never seen this before! Maybe I've just never looked that close. In this colony I saw lots of female worker bees secreting wax. They have 8 glands in their abdomens which secrete the wax. When it hits the air it hardens into little white wax flakes. It require a lot of energy to make wax. 7 units of honey make 1 unit of wax. They scrape it off with their legs, chew it and mould it into the shapes they want. I couldn't stop watching it was so fascinating. Amazing little animals.

22/06/2026

Looking inside the queen cups to show that they have not been loaded with eggs. What beautiful works of art they are.

22/06/2026

Another weird looking frame. Honey surrounds a small patch of drone brood honeycomb on one side and worker brood on the other side. I did switch the brood box (large bee nursery) with a half brood box (small bee nursery) and so maybe that's why they did this. I've switched it back again now to a standard configuration.

22/06/2026

Oh no! Loads of queen cells or so I thought. When I looked closer non were loaded with eggs. It looked strange but they were building comb off a small super frame. There were loads of eggs in this colony and I just removed these large and plentiful queen cups.