Managing bees can be whatever you want to make it. You can have a couple hives for your garden, or a bunch of hives to give honey to your friends, or you can make a small business of it if you develop markets for your products.

Having one hive usually doesn’t cut it. With two hives you can transfer resources from one hive to another. When is this necessary? A hive cannot survive very long without a queen. She lays all the eggs and the eggs hatch into the workers (all female) and the drones (no stingers, main function is breeding, after which, if successful, the male dies in midflight). But a queen is also needed to make another queen. If a hive loses their queen, the hive can make a new queen if the hive has eggs which are three days old or less. If a hive does not have a queen, nor young eggs, the beekeeper can take a frame of eggs from another hive and the workers will make a new queen from those eggs. Worker bees know within minutes if their queen is dead or missing. They also know if she has shot her wad, so to speak, meaning she is shooting blanks, or, laying only unfertilized eggs which will produce only males. This, too, leads to the colony’s demise.

The most basic ingredient to the hive and to the creation of a new queen is the young egg. When a queen lays an egg in the bottom of one of the hexagonal wax cells built so precisely by her workers, nurse bees immediately surround the egg with royal jelly. All eggs have this royal jelly the first few days. What separates the queen cell from all the other cells is that she will be feed royal jelly all through her larval stage. The queen gets the T-bone while the rest of the brood gets beebread. Beebread is a real thing; a mixture of pollen and honey synthesized by the working nurse bees. But those cells destined for royalty are fed only royal jelly which is produced by the nurse bees from a gland in their hypopharynx. This diet of jelly stimulates the development of queen morphology culminating in the development of ovaries.

Last week I was selling and delivering boxes of young bees with new queens laying like gangbusters and loving the transition of the apiaries from nurseries to production sites.

The spring rush to split hives and prevent swarming is coming to an end right along with the slowdown in nectar flow. The bees are in an accumulation stage now and thinking about solidifying their home for the coming winter. Storage, storage is the name of the game. The hot weather triggers wax building impulses and the young bees are in high gear constructing beautiful new white wax comb. Sometimes the queen lays an egg on new comb that is barely formed, and the workers build the cells around the eggs as they swell and hatch and turn to larvae. When the larva is a certain age, and this age varies with sex and class, the larva is capped with a shield of wax and after a few days begins to pupate. Queens take 16 days to go from a laid egg to a hatching queen. Workers take 21 days, while the males (drones) require 24 days to reach hatching maturity.

The bees have gone through the blossoming of all those early trees -- swamp maple, willows, on to the viburnum, black cherry, locust -- and now we have the beautiful red dogwood blooming along the brook and the tulip trees in bloom. White clover will soon dominate the lawn and I will be hesitant to mow.

But what I need is honey! Now that I am done selling the bees themselves it’s time to sell some honey. I have been sold out for weeks. I know which hive boxes have the new 2022 honey -- full, and capped over, and dripping with goodness. I gotta get out there and pull some frames and get them into the cellar and into the extractor and spin out that golden thread. Bottle. Maybe today!