FAQs
A compendium of frequently asked questions… curated and answered by our community —
Eggs:
Bee eggs are distinctive once you learn how to spot them, but can definitely be hard to recognize at first. They look like grains of rice but are about 1/3 - 1/4 the size. The egg is laid upright, and over the course of 3 days will gradually fall over and hatch - this is one way of determining how long an egg has been in the cell for. The reason they are hard to spot is because prior to laying, a worker “polishes” the cell, making it all nice and shiny. Eggs often blend into the background noise of glistening cell floors, making them hard to spot. A small pen flashlight can come in very helpful in your pocket when you know you are going to need to spot eggs (there’s a reason bee suits have so many pockets that are so big).
Eggs are super clear in the example photos, but can be a LOT harder to spot in real life. Plastic foundation has little irregularities in the center of a cell that can be easily mistaken for eggs at first. Cells filled with nectar can create reflections that can also be mistaken for eggs. A flashlight can really help, as can tilting the frame around to find the right angle. Eggs will most often be around existing brood, so that’s a good place to start looking. They’re also a lot easier to spot on black foundation than white, which is why it’s often used in brood boxes… however the bees won’t care one way or the other.
Learning to recognize eggs is very useful, as it will quickly tell you that you have an active queen… who can be a LOT harder to find!
Larvae:
Bee larvae are much easier to spot at a glance. Newly hatched larvae (4-5 days old) are not much bigger than the egg at first, but are then curled and a bit easier to recognize. You may also see them practically floating in a small pool of milky white fluid… this is the royal jelly that all larvae get at first (and queens get a lot more of), it’s completely normal. By 5-6 days old, larvae have gotten much bigger, like fat little grubs. These you will see immediatly. By day 7-8, they will practically fill their entire cell. Worker brood are capped on day 9.
Answer
This is a very common question here, but in the vast majority of cases it’s entirely normal.
What you are seeing is called “bearding”, where bees gather on the outside of the hive, or hanging underneath it en masse (like a beard!). They mostly do this for purposes of temperature control… when it’s very hot and/or humid, bees move outside to lower the hive’s temperature. More bees generate more heat, so as the hive population gets bigger, bearding becomes more common even on not-very-hot days. And it can be dramatic (***link photo).
But again, this is totally normal. It does not mean something is wrong, it does not mean you need to do anything. You might consider increasing the hive opening depending on your reducer setting and bee population size, but even that seems pretty negligible. People successfully raise bees in extremely hot conditions all around the world, and bees have a great way of controlling that heat… by bearding.
Now… yes, bearding is one of the signs of an imminent swarm, as they will sometimes stage outside for a while before actually taking off. However, because bearding is so common and normal, it is not a good swarm indicator in and of itself. Swarming needs to be assessed from inside the hive… are they backfilling the brood area, has the queen stopped laying, are there swarm cells, etc. (See *** for a more detailed discussion of swarming.) If you’re monitoring for those things and know your swarm seasonality, you can probably safely ignore bearding. And chances are high you’re going to get used to seeing a lot of it.
In other words - if a hive is going to swarm, then yes they might beard. But the fact that they are bearding does NOT necessarily indicate that they are going to swarm.
You usually don’t. If your queen has left, and you don’t know what happens next, head over to our Biology section to learn about colony reproduction.
If you have a colony that is definitely queenless, go take a look at our Queenless? page.
And if you want to start breeding queens to introduce to other colonies, you’ll have to wait. We haven’t written that page yet. Our queen breeder community member is a busy guy!
TODO: Get num to write an article on breeding queens