This article shows some of my work with bees from the apiary to the bee house. Here I am handling bees that ordinarily would be merely united with another colony under normal beekeeping practices. Here, the reader can see how I handle bees when I want to study other options.
During the spring of 2025, top-bar hive #27 had a queenless colony with a slowly decreasing population. I never knew the misfortune that caused the colony to lose its queen. The colony had wintered well with 20 combs and was otherwise unremarkable in the spring and moderate in size (occupying about 10 combs).
By August 23, the colony was extremely weak, and I wanted to study it in the bee house. I moved the bees to a single-comb observation hive beside the top-bar hive’s location in the apiary. Figure 1 shows the initial setup. Sometimes when the colony population slowly decreases, the bees slowly deplete their resources, resulting in a hive without stored honey or pollen. The slow resource depletion restricts wax moths and small hive beetles from destroying the combs because they are empty. Our season with unusually cool nights in the summer most likely helped keep both of these problems at bay too. (Usually in August, hot and humid, several hundred beetles can be found in a hive.)
When resources are bleak, with only a scattering of open cells of unripe honey and pollen, not even laying-worker eggs were in the hive. Figure 2 helps give a perspective of a very small cluster surrounded by a huge mass of empty comb. In normal beekeeping, one would shake the bees into another hive, take the combs for protection against wax moths, and end the situation in a moment. I wanted to study the bees. In past encounters with these bees, long into terminal queenlessness, I have found them to be fascinating, and sometimes surprising.
Most bees were on both sides of a center comb. I took that comb for the one to install in the observation hive. Figure 3 shows that comb in the hive. Figure 4 shows a closer view of the bees in the observation hive. Now my setup looks like Figure 1, but with a comb and some bees in the observation hive …
