Cutting open an old beehive

This branch came down last year and has been sitting in the neighbors' yard ever since. Most of the honey has already been robbed from it.

I brought it home and finally got a jigsaw to cut it open. I will use some of the comb for swarm catching, and melt down the rest.

Category:

Pets & Animals

Tags:

• bees
• honeybees
• honey
• hive
• honeycomb

[kitsurubami]

what do you mean by "swarm catching, and melt down the rest"? i don't know anything about bees.

[kittbo]

@kitsurubami Bees are attracted to the scent of beeswax, so if you are trying to catch a swarm of bees, putting some old comb in a box will make them more likely to investigate and accept it as a possible new home. Swarms are a way of expanding the population; the old queen will leave the hive and take a bunch of workers with her to look for a new home, while the old hive produces a new queen. Beekeepers like to catch such swarms for their hives. They're free and usually robust.

[kitsurubami]

@kittbo oh very cool. and melting down?

[kittbo]

@kitsurubami The rest of the comb can be melted down, filtered and poured into molds to make candles or other things that use beeswax, such as lip balm.

[cookiekoen]

@kittbo How does the old hive produce a new queen?

[kittbo]

@cookiekoen The worker bees will take one of the larvae (baby bees) and put it in a larger container in the comb (called a queen cell) and feed it a substance called royal jelly, which they produce from their bodies. Every baby bee gets some royal jelly, but baby queens get more, and it turns them into queens. The bees will often make several such baby queens, and the first to hatch out will go around and kill the others.

[kittbo]

@kittbo Then she will fly out of the hive to mate once with boy bees (drones). Once she has mated, she will spend the rest of her life laying eggs to make more bees. That's it in a nutshell!

[kitsurubami]

@kittbo cool. thanks for the replies.