I recently got a couple new colonies of honey bees. These were nucleus colonies, which are just tiny honey bee colonies in small (and more portable) boxes. They rapidly outgrow such small boxes, so moving them into new boxes (and looking them over and taking photos while I was at it) was my first task. Here’s a bit of what I encountered.
Honey bee eggs (mostly on the left) and just hatched larvae. The liquid around the larvae is their food; probably royal jelly. (All larvae are fed royal jelly until they are three days old, after three days, only queens are fed royal jelly.)
The black background to these photos is foundation, a template that the bees construct their comb on inside the hive. Foundation is a sheet of wax, or plastic (or wax coated plastic) printed with a hexagon pattern that the bees draw out into comb. In this case it is black plastic, which is often helpful for beginners to be able to see the bee eggs and young larvae, which is useful in assessing the health of the colony. (You actually literally have to train your eyes to see them; I had good eyesight and knew what I was looking for when I started, but I simply wasn’t able to see them through my veil so I would take it off temporarily. Now I can see them just fine through my veil.)
Honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae. One cell contains two eggs. Very young queens sometimes do this when they are still learning how to lay eggs properly.Close up of a few bees on the comb. The light in this picture highlights their fur (they even have fur on their eyes). Young bees are especially fuzzy.Honey bees with eggs (mostly on the left again) and just hatched larvae.Worker honey bees surrounding their queen. This queen is marked with a white dot on her back (this is also something that can be helpful for beginners to be able to spot the queen among the thousands of worker bees, but it can also be helpful for people who have a lot of hives, or are breeding queens and need to keep track of them more carefully).
Leafcutter bee (megachile sp) and bumble bee (bombus sp) with pollen on thistle
There are at least three different species of wild bees that nest within a few feet of my back door. Most people never notice that they’re there. Most wild bees are solitary, meaning that they don’t live in colonies. Instead, the female bees build nests and provision them with nectar and pollen and lay an egg or eggs in them. Two of the three outside my back door are solitary, but one is social, meaning that they do live in a colony and even they are very discreet.
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata)
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) drying off on a leaf after a rain shower
The first bees I noticed nesting outside the back door were two-spotted bees, or melissodes bimaculata, as I usually think of them. (I didn’t learn the common name when I first identified them, and I assumed they probably didn’t have one since most common names for bees don’t refer to a single species; they refer to a group of related species. A year or two later, I came across the common name.) These bees have been nesting in the vicinity of the back door since we moved here, which means they’ve probably been there longer than that. Two-spotted bees are solitary bees that nest in the ground and emerge late in the year (I have not even seen any of them yet this year). They usually start to appear at about the time our lemon balm starts to flower, and I frequently see them foraging on it. They are named for the two rectangular spots on the back of the abdomen of the females (bimaculata also means two spotted).
Two-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) with pollen on lemon balm flowerTwo-spotted bee (melissodes bimaculata) resting on lemon balm flower. You can see one of her two spots in this picture.
Leafcutter bee (megachile sp)
Leaf cutter bee (megachile sp) cutting maple leaf
The next bees I noticed were the leafcutter bees. They are not nearly as consistent about nesting in the same spot every year, but there was at least one nest three years ago, and several nests this year that I’ve observed. They’ve certainly been around other years, but I wasn’t able to spot exactly where they were nesting. Leafcutter bees are also solitary, and they build their nests out of pieces of leaves that they collect. They roll the leaves up into a tube, and divide the tube into sections that each will contain one egg and its food provisions. I enjoy watching them forage since they and the other bees in their family are the only bees to store the pollen they’ve collected on the underside of their abdomen, often causing them to hold it up high so that the pollen they’ve collected doesn’t get brushed off.
Female leafcutter bees have large jaws for clipping leaves, which they use to build their nests
Bumble bee (bombus sp)
Bumble bee with pollen, hanging from comfry flower
The third bees to make their nest right outside my door are the bumble bees. These are social bees, and there is one colony living at the edge of the lemon balm patch. They live underground and there is no obvious hole leading to their nest, so they are basically invisible… much like the other bees in this list. I think I was expecting them to be slightly more noticeable since they are social, and honey bees and yellow jackets (a social, sometimes ground nesting wasp) are both fairly noticeable. Both have a steady stream of traffic at their entrance and the yellow jackets do have a noticeable hole when they nest in the ground. But the bumble bees have one or two bees coming and going every few minutes and nothing to see to indicate they’re there otherwise.
Bumble bee peeking out from behind blue vervain
Bumble bees spend the warm months of the year living as a colony, and in the fall they raise a new batch of queens which hibernate over winter and start new colonies in the spring. The old queen and colonies don’t overwinter. Because of this, the colonies are in different locations each year.
Tomatoes are tricky plants to pollinate, but bumble bees have mastered the technique by vibrating their wings at the exact frequency to cause the flower to release its pollen. You can often hear them doing it if you watch them forage.
As I was wading around our land taking pictures of the flooding, I started to notice a lot of little creatures taking refuge from all the water…
Some ants, a jumping spider, and a snail on a blade of grasswet caterpillarGarter snake up on our wood pile, out of the waterIn this clump of grass sticking out of the water, there were hundreds of pillbugs and sowbugs clustered there to escape the flood. Pillbugs and sowbugs are crustaceans (like crayfish and lobsters). They are the only crustacean families that have adapted to live on land… making it a bit ironic to see them all fleeing the flood.Jumping spider clinging to some grassA couple of pillbugs on a blade of grassA rove beetle and another insect (I’m not sure what at this angle)caterpillarWhen I took this picture, I thought I was just photographing some pillbugs on a floating stick, but looking at my pictures, I realized there is an insect hiding in this photo. Can you spot it?A variety of small creatures on a dried stalk of grassA couple of rove beetles and a pillbugThis is another case of my noticing something after the fact… I did not see the millipede when I was taking this photo!Spiders are the show offs, as they can run around on the surface of the water. They look like they are running on a super slippery surface, and they probably prefer having something solid to stand on.Three ants and a beetleA clump of ants clinging to a twigAnts, a couple pillbugs, and a fireflyA rove beetle and an ant.Spider holding onto some dried grassSome pillbugs on a dried grass stem (and an ant)Another rove beetle
