Mr. Hill's Apiary

Today Kwao and I drove up in the mountains about 20 minutes away to drop off the bee boxes that we had built at Mr. Hill's bee farm. He has about 150 hives and he took us around to all of them, so I got to see a variety of hives of different ages and health levels. We spotted a swarm which Andrew, on of the helpers on his farm, was dispatched to remove. I learned that bees will swarm if there isn't enough space in their box so part of the colony leaves to find a new home. This can be solved by just building an open bottomed box filled with frames and stacking it on top of the previous one. We also rescued a young queen from being killed off by worker bees. Whenever the colony needs a new queen, they build multiple queen cells (which look much bigger and blobbier than worker cells) and raise queen larva. Once they all hatch the colony kills off all but the strongest queen. Getting to see Mr. Hills apiary was really interesting because I had never had a chance to see and compare so many hives!

some of his ~150 Langstroth hives

Larva that died because there weren't enough bees in the hive to care for them

smoking out the hive interfers with the bees' pheramone warning signals and makes them confused and less likely to sting

A comb full of honey ready to be harvested!

Andrew climbing the coconut tree to get us an afternoon snack

Salvaging a queen from the pile of bees