Honeybees, like all insects, go through a metamorphosis as they develop from egg to adult. Queens can lay up to 3000 eggs per day. The eggs are deposited at the bottom of a honeycomb cell and are attended by nurse bees for three days. The egg becomes larva and, after about nine days the nurse bees cap the cell with wax. The larva turns vinto pupa inside their covered cells and emerge as adult bees after 21 days in the case of female bees and 24 days for drones.
A healthy queen surrounded by hundreds of attendant bees will produce far more eggs than are needed for the hive to survive and beekeepers use the extra brood to create new hives. Beekeepers take frames of brood and some nurse bees, put them into a separate box, add a new queen and move it to a new location to create an entirely new colony of honeybees.
Frames of brood are a valuable lifeforce and beekeepers who want to grow their apiaries will make as many new hives as possible without weakening the original hives. Depending on the weather conditions in the spring, hives can be split once or twice.
Our first Bee Cube™ now has 32 beehives, and they are thriving. We purposely put the bees into smaller nucleus boxes which have five frames so that we could easily remove frames of brood without weakening the original colonies. Our plan now is to split all the hives by early June. We will use the new colonies to populate our second Bee Cube™ and sell any surplus colonies to local beekeepers.
We will then wait another few weeks and split the hives again. The Bee Cube™ has an ideal internal environment which allows the bees to focus on creating brood instead of using their energy to survive in unpredictable spring weather conditions. We’ve essentially created a ‘brood factory’ which supports the propagation of bees which, in turn, will help the local bee industry become more self-sustaining.
Our second Bee Cube™ is being built and should be ready in early June. Stay tuned for new developments and sign up for our newsletter. www.beecube.io
Herman Van Reekum
May 31, 2024
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