BEEKEEPING
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position to which is added a
small bath of royal jelly. The
tiny egg hatches on the third
day into a small white grub.
After a further three days this
little grub is now known as
bee larva and is fed a mixture
of pollen and nectar.
After eight days enough food
store is packed into the cell
with the larva and the cell is
capped with a thin layer of
wax. During the next 15 days
the larva develops into a pupa
and 23 days after the egg was
laid a young worker bee
chews her way around the
capping of her cell and out
she crawls, a young worker
Relative sizes of the three inhabitants of a beehive
bee.
During the summer season
the queen can lay two
thousand eggs a day, more
than her own body weight,
which impresses upon one
the nutrient power of the
royal jelly that she is continually fed during the day and
night.
The entourage of young bees
that feed the queen only
secrete royal jelly for about
three days after which they
become house cleaner bees,
then guard bees and then
worker flyers, bringing in
nectar and pollen. They are
thus continually being
replaced to feed the queen.
In her third year, the queen
begins to fail. She loses her
pheromone odour, egg laying
starts to diminish, she starts
missing polished cells and the
bees sense this situation and
start to build new queen cells
to replace the mother queen.
The queen becomes fully
aware of the desire to replace
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her. The bees construct a
batch of drone cells, about
two hundred in total, slightly
larger than worker cells, and
she lays eggs that will produce
drones because the new
queen will require drones to
mate with her.
These drone cells are also an
indication to the beekeeper
that the queen intends to
swarm off because new young
rival queens will destroy her.
She sends out scout bees to
find a new abode, nurse bees
stop feeding her so that she
can lose weight to enable her )ΡΌ