New Queens Have Hatched! Exciting News!
We are thrilled to announce that two new Queens have hatched in the Kowalski Apiary! We had two queen-less colonies. The feral hive of bees that we extracted from the Rosin family home (link below). As well as one of our initial hives that we split were both queenless hives. The hives contained Queen cells that are used to raise a new queen when needed.
How Do Bees Rear a Queen?
The simplest explanation for now is that the bees super feed the queen cells to rear their own queen. God’s creation just amazes me… I want to research this more and I’ll be posting more about this amazing process in the future. Read what I discovered here
Counting the Days Until Queens Bees Hatch
Philip has been closely watching the calendar, so her knew the larvae should emerge. Today he inspected the hives to see if our colonies were successful in creating new queens. Join us to see these brand new Queens that have hatched in the Kowalski Apiary!
Beautiful Virgin Queens Newly Hatched
The virgin queen must now leave the hive to mate and she will return to the hive she emerged in to take up her royal duties of egg laying.
How do we know she’s a Virgin Queen?
Well we highly suspect that she is. We’ve been monitoring the hives closely and counting the days necessary to hatch a queen bee. This is the first day that we would expect to find a queen bee. Had several days passed, the likelihood that the queen has already taken her maiden flight in search of drones would be more likely. Since we expect that she has just emerged from the queen cell, she is likely a virgin queen. However she might not be.. we can’t be certain.
How did we get a Queenless Colony
One of the queen less hives is the feral hive we extracted from the Rosin family home, read more about it https://kowalskimountain.com/beekeeper-removes-a-bee-colony-from-a-house-naturally/
About the Author: Barbra-Sue Kowalski grew up on a small hobby farm. She was always drawn to farm life, however, she was stuck in an urban life far from her roots. Barbra-Sue was a single mom for 13 years, raising her 3 children on her own. She met Philip in 2018 and they married in 2021. Between the two of them, they have 5 grown children and 5 grandchildren. These empty nesters are following their dreams! As they both turn 50, they are building their off-grid homestead to live the life that they dream about. Learn more about Philip and Barbra-Sue here. Contact them here. To leave a comment on this post, please scroll down.
All hail the new Queens!!!!!!!!!
Very interesting how bees live and function in a hive! How long have you been keeping bees? A beginner guide to bee keeping would be really cool I know a lot of people are thinking about getting started with keeping bees.
We’ve only kept bees a few months actually…. they literally fell into our laps. My husband cut down a tree with a hive inside, so we decided to dive in.
That is amazing! What a cool way to start keeping bees.
Thank you, we are enjoying them.