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Queen bee Flora

We'd like to introduce our newest queen, Flora. Today we inspected that hive and found a beautiful mated queen, surr...

Sunset

We’d like to introduce our newest queen, Flora.

Today we inspected that hive and found a beautiful mated queen,surrounded by a circle of bees jostling each other to become partof her retinue. That’s her in the photo above.

We did not find any brood or eggs, but that makes sense, as Queen Floraprobably has only just started laying eggs. We only found lots ofhoney. So we robbed a frame of brood from Fauna, our other Langstrothhive, so Flora would have some new bees to tide her over until the newqueen gets up to speed in the egg laying department.

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll remember the virgin queen we found in one of our hives 2 weeks ago. That’s her in the photo below.  That virgin queen might have left the hive in a swarm, taking half the bees along with her. If she did that, then the bees that remained would have had a new queen that hatched from one of the swarm cells we found in that hive. Since we don’t really know, we’re imagining that we saw Flora before she was a mom.