The hive base coat color will be yellow. The design element on top of the yellow will be green foliage and small red flowers. I may trim the edge of the top covers in a black stripe.
You paint hives with all the frames out and stacked in a corner, which got me to thinking about the surface area inside the hive. I will have two hives, each with two deeps and two mediums. That’s a total of 80 frames, with two sides to each frame. A single hive, as described, is about 61 square feet of surface area.
At peak, a single hive might hold 60,000 bees, all of whom will share a common queen mother who, as a virgin queen, will have flown out into field and forest to mate with maybe half a dozen male drones from another hive.
Every worker and drone in a hive, and all of their replacements over the next year or two, will be the product of this one mating excursion.
The queen is a egg-laying machine; she does almost nothing else. With added weight, she can no longer fly. She cannot feed herself or clean herself; all of that work is done by her worker bee daughters. Drones in a hive are largely expendable; they are tossed out in late Fall to freeze to death. Drones do some guard duty in the Spring and Summer, and are the favorite host of the parasitic varroa mite, which is the chief cause of hive collapse.
No comments:
Post a Comment