Film in Toscana | Bees in the garden - Catching a swarm of bees at Casa vacanze Podere Santa Pia
 

   
 
Essaim d'abeilles en vol (modifiée).jpg

A swarm about to land [1]

       
   
A swarm of bees at Casa Vacanze Podere Santa Pia | Artificial swarming


   
   

Artificial swarming

When a colony accidentally loses its queen, it is said to be "queenless". The workers realize that the queen is absent after as little as an hour, as her pheromones fade in the hive. The colony cannot survive without a fertile queen laying eggs to renew the population, so the workers select cells containing eggs aged less than three days and enlarge these cells dramatically to form "emergency queen cells". These appear similar to large peanut-like structures about an inch long that hang from the center or side of the brood combs. The developing larva in a queen cell is fed differently from an ordinary worker-bee; in addition to the normal honey and pollen, she receives a great deal of royal jelly, a special food secreted by young "nurse bees" from the hypopharyngeal gland. This special food dramatically alters the growth and development of the larva so that, after metamorphosis and pupation, it emerges from the cell as a queen bee. The queen is the only bee in a colony which has fully developed ovaries, and she secretes a pheromone which suppresses the normal development of ovaries in all her workers.

Beekeepers use the ability of the bees to produce new queens to increase their colonies in a procedure called splitting a colony. To do this, they remove several brood combs from a healthy hive, taking care to leave the old queen behind. These combs must contain eggs or larvae less than three days old and be covered by young nurse bees, which care for the brood and keep it warm. These brood combs and attendant nurse bees are then placed into a small "nucleus hive" with other combs containing honey and pollen. As soon as the nurse bees find themselves in this new hive and realize they have no queen, they set about constructing emergency queen cells using the eggs or larvae they have in the combs with them.

 

YouTube | Bees in the garden - Catching a swarm of bees at Casa Vacanze Podere Santa Pia

 

 
   
   
 
   
 
Bee collecting pollen   Essaim d'abeilles posé.JPG  

Bee collecting pollen

 

 

A swarm attached to a branch

 

 

  How to capture a swarm

The first hive at Podere Santa Pia

 

Bienenkoenigin 43a   Apis mellifera carnica worker hive entrance 3   Bienen 35b-Detail

Queen bee (center)

 

  Worker bee  

Larger drones compared to smaller workers

 

Holiday accomodation in Tuscany




Case vacanza in Toscana | Podere Santa Pia



     
Colline sotto Podere Santa Pia
, Giuseppe Ungaretti
Podere Santa Pia
 

 
Colline sotto Podere Santa Pia
   
       

 

 

Mappa Podere Santa Pia | Ingrandire mappa

 


[1] Photo by F5ZV (Fichier:Essaim d'abeille posé.JPG),  licensed underthe Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Questo articolo è basato sull' articolo Beekeeping dell' enciclopedia Wikipedia ed è rilasciato sotto i termini della GNU Free Documentation License.