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Florida Beekeeping, Level 2
You've got your first hives through a season. Level 2 is the next step: reading a colony before it acts, keeping mites and beetles down in Florida's long warm season, making splits and queens, handling defensive colonies, and making and selling more honey. It picks up where the beginner course ends.
10 lessons. Lesson 1 is free. Unlock the rest for $39.00, or get both courses for $59.00. Get the full course ↓
Lesson 1: Reading the brood nest like a pro
In the beginner course you learned to ask "is the queen laying?" Now you'll read the frames well enough to know what the colony is about to do, often a week or two before it does it.
- Use the calendar in the comb. Eggs hatch in 3 days, workers are capped about day 9 and emerge on day 21. If you see eggs, the queen was there in the last 3 days. If you see only capped brood and no eggs or young larvae, she's been gone (or stopped laying) for at least a week.
- A good pattern is a solid oval of capped brood with eggs and open larvae in a ring around it, then pollen, then honey above. A few empty cells are normal. A peppered, shotgun pattern across the whole frame can mean a failing queen, inbreeding, disease or heavy mites. Look closer before you blame the queen.
- Laying workers. Several eggs per cell, eggs stuck on the cell walls instead of the bottom, and bullet-shaped drone cappings in worker cells mean the colony has been queenless long enough for workers to start laying. A laying worker colony rarely accepts a new queen easily. The usual fix is to shake the bees out away from the hive or combine them with a strong queenright colony.
- Swarm cells vs. supersedure cells. Several cells hanging from the bottom edges of frames in a crowded spring hive usually mean swarming. One to three cells on the face of a frame, with no crowding, usually mean the bees are replacing their queen. Leave supersedure cells alone. Treat swarm cells as a deadline (Lesson 4 and the beginner course's swarm lesson).
- Queen cups (empty, open-ended cups) are normal. Look inside: a cup with an egg or larva floating in royal jelly is a real queen cell.
- Drone brood in spring is a sign of a healthy, building colony. Lots of drone brood scattered in worker comb is not.
Practice: on your next inspection, write one line per frame (for example "F4: capped brood, eggs, pollen arc"). After a month you'll be reading frames in seconds.
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