Images from my bee hive

5 weeks ago I installed my package of honey bees into my hive. And it's been an on going learning and loving adventure with these amazing creatures.

In the time since I've first got the bees I have learned so much and have gotten over some of my fears of working around them. I have always been able to get very close to bees while they were foraging for pollen or nectar, but now I am at total ease with 300 to 400 bees buzzing all around me while I work in the hive.

Unfortunately shooting a DSLR and getting the work done in the hive as fast as possible so as not to create too much turmoil for the bees is what I'm still working on. Shooting through a protective mesh is actually pretty hard. And sometimes its just easier to shoot images with my 8mp cell phone camera.

But here's what I've got so far. It's a mix of both my 7D and my cell phone camera.

Lovely series- esp like #1 & #5
Brian v.

Nice shots.

nice set

Good ones Chas, especially the first shot.

Thanks all.

That first shot is of what is known as a gaurd bee. They stand at the front entrance to the hive and check every bee that comes in for the same scent. If it's a bee with a different scent, a wasp/hornet, bumble bee or ant that tries to get in then there's a through down! And a few other bees will join in as well. They defend their hive very, very well. And that's why the very first thing I smoke are those bees at the front entrance. The smoke calms them and masks the "danger, danger" scent they put off to warn the rest of the colony.

#5 is a shot of the Queen bee doing her thing. She lays 3000 eggs a day! The bees directly around her are her attendants. They feed her and remove her waste. She doen't have time to even take a moment for herself. None of them do. Bees will litterly work themselves to death. The Queen will live for 3 to 4 years, but the worker will only last 6 weeks durning the spring and Summer nectar season. Then come Fall, all the drones are forcibly removed from the hive and left to die outside the hive. They eat too much and don't do anything for the hive other than eat all the Winter stores. Come Spring time they will create more drones to mate with the queen again.

Owning this hive has taught me a lot about bees and how to approach them. And it's super cool to just watch them do their jobs. They are actually very peaceful creatures.

Nice shots and interesting info Chas

This is a beautiful set of pics. Thanks for sharing.

Great set of images. I particularly like the backlit bees in the hive.

Chas, a few questions for ya:

I had come across an abandoned house awhile back, and I was shocked to find literally thousands of dead bees which appeared to have been trapped inside the house and died. It was a very eerie discovery for sure. I had assumed some sort of colony collapse had taken place.

Months later, I went back to the house and tried to make my way inside again, only to find that the house was very much alive again and I narrowly escaped with my life.

I am curious if what I found was what you describe with the drones being left to die in the off-season?

Here's a few images of what I found:

Wow, that's nasty. That looks like some sort of colony collapse for sure. So the hive must have been inside the abandoned house. That's more than just the drones. In a colony of 60K bees, maybe only 1000 of them will be the drones. So there are way more than 1000 dead bees in your images. Maybe they were fumagated by some idiot. Killing off wild (feral) hives is really, really bad.

Now if these were Africanized bees, then maybe someone was having an issue with them and that's why the massive kill off. Usually bees don't die like that, in that big of a pile without some sort of outside influence.

As for a non-Africanized colony being taken over by Africanized bees, well I'm not sure exactly how it happens, but it more than likely its a very hostile take over. The queen gets killed and a new one is superceded with an Africanized Queen. Thus those genetics eventually take over.
Bees sometimes have massive battles between colonies. A stronger colony sometimes tries to rob the honey from a weaker colony and hundreds of bees die in the proccess. Not a pretty sight at all.

So is the house full of new bees again? If so, be very careful. You live in Africanized bee territory. We don't get them up here in Colorado. They tend to not like our cold winters and so they don't come too far North.