🐝 The Colony and How It Works

A honey bee colony contains three kinds of individual. You must be able to name all three on a comb, in the field, without a lens, because almost every inspection decision depends on it.

The queen is female and diploid, meaning she came from a fertilised egg. There is normally exactly one in a colony. She lays all the eggs, and she produces the mandibular pheromone that holds the colony together. She is longer than a worker, with a long tapering abdomen, and she moves purposefully across the comb with workers turning to face her.

The worker is also female and also diploid, also from a fertilised egg. Workers are the great majority of the colony. They do all the labour: cleaning cells, nursing brood, building comb, receiving nectar, guarding the entrance, carrying water, ventilating the nest, and foraging.

The drone is male and haploid, from an unfertilised egg. Drones are seasonal, from none at all to a few thousand. Their only function is mating. A drone does not forage, does not sting, and does not feed himself efficiently. He is broader and blunter than a worker, with very large eyes that meet on top of his head, and he is noisy in flight.

Now the single most important genetic fact in beekeeping, and the one that makes queen rearing and colony splitting possible at all.

A queen and a worker come from identical eggs. There is no queen egg and no worker egg. The difference is entirely diet during the larval stage. A larva fed royal jelly throughout becomes a queen. A larva switched to worker jelly and bee bread becomes a worker. Same egg, different food, different animal.

Read the consequence carefully, because you will use it constantly. A colony that loses its queen can raise a replacement from any young worker larva it already has. This is why an inspection that finds eggs and young larvae tells you the colony has a future even if the queen has just been killed. It is also the mechanism behind every split you will ever make: take brood with eggs and young larvae into a new hive, leave it queenless, and it builds its own queen.

Now the drones, and the fact that changes how you think about breeding. A drone is haploid. He has no father. He carries only his mother's genes, and every sperm he produces is genetically identical to every other sperm he produces.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable. The temperament of your next generation of workers is decided by the queen's mating flights, not by the drones sitting in your own hives. She flies out and mates on the wing with drones from every colony for kilometres around, managed and feral alike. You cannot control open mating in an African apiary. Nobody can.

That is why buying a gentle queen does not give you a gentle apiary. Her own workers may be calm, but her daughters mate with local drones and the temperament reverts within a generation or two. This is exactly the mechanism by which the Americas became Africanised after scutellata bees were exported to Brazil in 1956. Selection at the colony level, propagating from your calmest colonies and requeening or removing the worst, is the only breeding tool a small-scale beekeeper actually has, and it works slowly.

How many bees are in a colony? Be careful here, because this is a place where a confident number would be dishonest. European honey bee colonies are typically given as containing 30,000 to 100,000 bees. A Kenyan guide states that a queen may lay up to 2,000 eggs a day and a very strong colony may hold up to 60,000 workers with several hundred drones, seasonally variable, but that guide does not say whether those figures were measured on African bees or carried over from a European text. No sourced population count for a wild or hived Apis mellifera scutellata colony was available for this course. African colonies are generally reported as smaller-nesting and more mobile than European ones, but that is a description and not a measurement.

So treat every colony population figure you meet as indicative. What you can do instead is far more useful: judge your own colonies against each other. A colony covering twelve combs is strong compared with one covering four in the same apiary on the same day, and that comparison is real, local, and yours.

One last identification skill. Drone brood is capped with a raised, domed cap, unmistakably different from the flat capping of worker brood. If you find a colony with only drone brood in worker-sized cells, that is not a drone-laying queen doing her job. That is a serious problem and Lesson 5 explains it.

These timings are not trivia. Almost every practical decision in the apiary is derived from them, and a beekeeper who knows them can read a comb like a calendar.

Be clear about where they come from. The table below is from a United States extension teaching source. No African-measured brood development table was available for this course. African bee development is generally reported in the literature as marginally faster than European, which is one proposed explanation for their Varroa tolerance, but no primary African measurement of scutellata worker development time was retrieved. So treat these as the European and North American values and teach them as such.

Egg stage, all three castes: 3 days.

Larva, uncapped and being fed: queen 5.5 days, worker 6 days, drone 6.5 days.

Pupa, capped and sealed: queen 7.5 days, worker 12 days, drone 14.5 days.

Total from egg to emergence: queen 16 days, worker 21 days, drone 24 days.

From those you can work out the day each cell is capped, by adding the egg and larval stages. Queen cells are capped about day 8.5, worker cells about day 9, drone cells about day 9.5.

Now use them.

Eggs stand upright in the cell for about the first day and then lie progressively flatter as they approach hatching. So an egg standing upright was laid within about a day. An egg lying flat is about to hatch. And any egg at all proves a queen was laying within the last three days. That single deduction is the reason you almost never need to find the queen. Seeing eggs answers the question, and it answers it in five seconds instead of twenty minutes of hunting through combs and enraging a defensive colony.

The worker cell is capped on day 9 and the bee emerges on day 21, so the capped worker brood period is 12 days. That twelve-day sealed window is exactly where the Varroa mite reproduces, safe from any contact treatment. Everything about mite control follows from it.

The drone emerges on day 24, so drone brood is capped for the longest period of the three. That makes drone brood the mite's preferred nursery, and it is the basis of drone-brood trapping as a chemical-free control.

The queen emerges on day 16. Now think about what that means for a colony that loses its queen today. Sixteen days to a virgin queen, then mating flights, then the start of laying. That is weeks with no new eggs. Be honest about the last part of that sequence: the exact interval from queen emergence to first laying was not available for this course. It is commonly given as about a week in the trade, but this course cannot confirm it, so do not plan on a precise figure. Plan on several weeks with no new brood after any queen loss or any split.

Now a disagreement you must know about. The United States extension source gives worker development as 21 days from egg to emergence. A Kenyan guide prints a conflicting table giving a total of 18.5 days. That is a genuine disagreement between two sources, not a gap that can be filled by picking one. This course teaches the 21-day figure because it comes from the teaching source used throughout, and it tells you plainly that a Kenyan practical guide prints a shorter figure.

What should you actually do? Two things. First, use 21 days for planning, and understand that if African bees really do develop faster, your colonies will be slightly ahead of your plan rather than behind it, which is the safer direction to be wrong in. Second, measure it yourself. It takes one marked comb and a notebook: find a comb with eggs, mark the top bar with the date, and come back on day 8 to see if worker cells are capped and around day 20 and 21 to see when they emerge. Two or three colonies observed this way will tell you what your own bees do, and that record is worth more than either printed table.

One more use for these timings. If you find a colony with queen cells and you want to know how much time you have, the cell is capped about day 8.5 and the queen emerges about day 16. A capped queen cell therefore means emergence within roughly a week. A colony preparing to swarm usually leaves before the new queens emerge, so a capped queen cell is a warning that time is short.

Write all of this on a card and keep it in your smoker box. Egg 3. Worker capped 9, out 21. Drone out 24. Queen out 16. Those five numbers will carry you through your whole beekeeping life.

A colony is a population, and a population is governed by two rates. Get this one idea and the entire beekeeping calendar falls into place.

Population change equals the queen's laying rate minus the adult death rate, with a 21-day lag between the two, because an egg laid today does not become an adult for 21 days.

That lag is the whole story. Read what follows from it.

First: a colony's strength today was decided three weeks ago. Nothing you do this morning changes how many foragers are flying this morning. If you want bees on a nectar flow, the queen must be laying hard three weeks before the flow starts, and in fact earlier than that, because a newly emerged bee does not fly out to forage on her first day. Kenyan practice puts the whole interval at six weeks: start feeding six to eight weeks before the date of flowering, because it takes six weeks from egg to adult foraging bee. That is 21 days of development plus the weeks of in-hive work before a worker graduates to foraging.

That six-week rule is the single most useful planning number in beekeeping. Whatever you want the colony to be doing at the flow, you must cause it six to eight weeks earlier.

Second: a colony builds up exponentially, then plateaus. More bees means more nurses, more nurses means more brood reared, more brood means more bees. The build-up accelerates by itself once it starts. Then it stops accelerating, and the plateau is set by three things: how much comb space there is, how much forage is available, and the queen's maximum laying rate. When you see a colony stop growing, ask which of those three is the limit before you do anything.

Third, and this is the one that catches beekeepers out: decline is fast. Turn off the laying and adult numbers fall on the worker lifespan clock. A worker lives approximately 5 to 7 weeks in the active season. So a queenless colony in an African apiary during a dearth can be empty within about six weeks. There is no reservoir. The colony is spending its adults continuously and only new emergence replaces them.

Put the two together and you get the diagnosis rule. A queen problem shows as a dwindling colony about a month later, not immediately. If a colony is suddenly weak, look back a month for the cause, not at yesterday.

A warning about the lifespan figure. The same source gives a second number: up to 5 to 6 months for the overwintering generation. That is a temperate-climate phenomenon, produced by bees that shut down brood rearing and sit out a cold winter. It should not be taught as applying to tropical Africa, where colonies are broodright for much or all of the year. And the honest position is this: the lifespan of an African worker bee through a tropical dry-season dearth was not available for this course. Nobody can tell you from a book how long your bees live through your dearth. If you want that number you will need a tropical apiculture physiology reference, or you will have to accept working without it, which is what most beekeepers do.

Fourth: brood is the colony's investment and honey is its savings. A colony under stress liquidates its investment first. During a nectar dearth it will cannibalise its own larvae, eating the protein back rather than continuing to feed brood it cannot support.

This has an immediate practical consequence and it is one of the commonest misdiagnoses in African beekeeping. Brood disappearing during a dearth is usually starvation, not disease. Check the stores before you diagnose anything. A colony with no sealed honey and no pollen and shrinking brood is a hungry colony, and the answer is feeding or moving the hive to forage, not treatment.

How does all of this change your work? It sets the order of the year. During the flowering and build-up phase, when nectar and pollen are rising and the queen is laying hard, that is when you make splits, add space and requeen. During the main flow you do not split, because splitting during the honey season reduces the honey produced. You add space ahead of need and you leave the colony alone. At the end of the flow, before the dearth bites, you harvest. During the dearth you reduce entrances against robbing, watch for absconding, and feed only if the colony will otherwise starve.

Every one of those decisions is the 21-day lag and the six-week rule in different clothes.

One caution about feeding. Sugar syrup fed during a flow, or shortly before harvest, ends up in your crop and adulterates it. The international standard limits sucrose to not more than 5 grams per 100 grams for general honeys, and that test will catch it. Feed to prevent starvation and to stimulate build-up. Never feed with supers on and never in the run-up to harvest.

Bees build their own house, and they build it to their own dimensions. If your hive matches those dimensions, the combs come out one at a time and you have a manageable colony. If it does not, the bees build across your bars, the combs break, and you have a box of angry bees you cannot inspect. This lesson is about the dimensions.

Start with comb spacing, and understand first that comb spacing is a property of the bee, not of the beekeeper. Different bees space their combs differently.

• African Apis mellifera: 32 to 34 mm centre to centre.
• European Apis mellifera: 36 to 38 mm.
• Apis cerana in Asia: 29 to 31 mm.

A second source gives Kenyan top-bar hive top bars as 32 to 35 mm wide, which overlaps the African figure at the lower end.

The top-bar width is what sets comb spacing, because the width of the bar incorporates both the bee space and the thickness of the comb hanging from it. So the teaching rule for African bees is: cut top bars at 32 to 34 mm. A bar cut to the European 35 to 38 mm pattern gives you cross-comb, where the bees build across several bars instead of along one, and the hive stops being a movable-comb hive. This is the commonest reason a home-made top bar hive does not work, and it is entirely avoidable with a ruler.

Bee space is the underlying principle. It is the gap bees leave open rather than filling with comb or propolis. Every movable-comb hive depends on it. If a gap is too small the bees propolise it shut. If it is too large they build brace comb across it. Either way the combs stop being movable. Be honest about one thing here: a standalone numeric bee space value for African bees was not available for this course. The top-bar width figures above are the practical form of the same constant, and they are what you should work to.

Now the rest of the Kenyan top-bar hive, from a general reference rather than a national standard. The authoritative Kenyan standard drawing was not available for this course, so treat these as commonly published figures and check them against a local hive maker.

• Overall length roughly 1 metre.
• Width and height between 30 cm and 50 cm.
• Side slope from vertical most commonly recommended at 30 degrees.
• Top bar length 430 to 510 mm.
• Maximum safe hive depth 300 mm.

That last figure is the most practically important number in hive design. Deeper than 300 mm and the weight of a comb full of honey tends to make it fall off the bar. Think about what that means in a hot climate: a deep comb of unripe honey on a warm afternoon is a comb that will break in your hands, drop into the hive, drown bees, trigger a defensive response, and very likely lead to absconding a few days later. Do not build deeper because it looks like more honey.

Why do the sides slope? Bees attach comb to walls. If the wall slopes away from the comb, the attachment area is small and the comb comes free when you lift the bar. That is the entire design idea of the Kenyan top-bar hive. The 30 degree figure is a recommendation, not a physical constant. A straight-sided hive, which is what is now sold in English-speaking countries as a Tanzanian hive, is simpler and cheaper to build with no angled cuts, but the combs attach to the walls and must be cut free with a knife at every inspection.

The standard number of top bars in a KTBH was not available for this course. Work it out yourself: bars equal internal hive length divided by bar width. A 1,000 mm hive with 33 mm bars takes about 30 bars, before you allow for end space and a follower board.

Now the nest itself. The brood nest is roughly spherical and it is kept warm. The regulated brood-nest temperature is conventionally given as approximately 34 to 35 degrees Celsius, but the exact figure and its tolerance band were not available for this course, so do not quote a precise number.

The comb layout, however, is predictable and it is the fact that makes clean harvesting possible: brood in the centre, a rim of pollen or bee bread around the brood, and honey above and outside it. That ordering is why you work from the ends of a top-bar hive inwards at harvest. The outer bars are honey. The centre is brood, and it must go back to the bees intact.

One last figure that tells you what comb is worth. About one million wax scales are needed to make 1 kg of wax, a worker produces about eight scales every twelve hours, and roughly 8 kg of honey are consumed to produce 1 kg of beeswax. Every time you crush a comb you are spending honey the bees already made. That is the true cost of the crush and strain method, and it is also why you should never waste comb or leave it lying for the wax moth.

A colony has no brain and no boss. It is coordinated by chemical signals, and once you understand four of them, a great deal of otherwise mysterious bee behaviour becomes obvious and predictable. Note at the outset that the specific chemical identities and concentrations of these compounds were not available for this course and are not needed for practical beekeeping. What matters is what each signal does.

Queen mandibular pheromone. This is the queen present signal. It spreads through the colony by contact as workers groom her and pass it on. Its loss is detected within minutes, and the detection triggers emergency queen rearing.

This is why a colony roars within about a minute of losing its queen during a clumsy inspection. If you crush the queen against a top bar, or knock her off a comb into the grass, the sound of the hive changes and it changes fast. Learn that sound. A sudden rise in pitch from a colony you are working is information, and it usually means you have just done damage.

Alarm pheromone. This is released with the sting, and it marks the target for further stinging. It is the reason one sting rapidly becomes many. It is also the reason you must move away from the hive and wash or change a stung glove or garment, because that glove is now a beacon telling every other bee where to sting.

The alarm signal is also why smoke works. Smoke masks the alarm pheromone, so the recruitment breaks down. This is a control, not magic. Kenyan practice is to smoke the entrance of the hive with about 8 to 10 puffs, then wait before opening. Cool, thick, continuous smoke is what you want. Running out of smoke halfway through an inspection is a safety failure, not an inconvenience, and this matters far more with African bees than with European ones.

The correct response to being stung follows directly from this. Scrape the sting out immediately, smoke the site, and withdraw. Do not carry on working with an alarm beacon on your glove.

Nasonov pheromone. This is the here we are orientation signal, fanned from the entrance by workers standing with their abdomens raised. It is how a swarm gathers itself, how returning bees find a hive that has been moved slightly, and how a colony guides itself into a new cavity. It is also the biological basis of swarm-baiting lures. If you have ever seen bees standing at the entrance with their tails up, fanning hard, that is Nasonov.

Brood pheromone. This one comes from open larvae, and it does two jobs. It stimulates foraging, and it suppresses the development of worker ovaries.

That second job is the important one, because when it fails you get one of the worst situations in beekeeping: laying workers. A colony that has been without open brood for a long period loses the suppression signal, and workers begin to develop ovaries and lay. But a worker has never mated. Every egg she lays is unfertilised, and every unfertilised egg becomes a drone. The colony fills with drones in worker cells, produces no workers at all, and dies.

Recognising laying workers is a core inspection skill. Look for these signs together:

• Multiple eggs in a single cell, often three or four.
• Eggs stuck on the cell walls rather than placed neatly upright at the bottom, because a worker's abdomen is too short to reach the base.
• All-drone brood in worker-sized cells, with the domed cappings standing proud of the flat worker pattern like a bad road surface.
• A long history of queenlessness in your records for that hive.

Any one of those on its own can mislead you. A brand new queen sometimes lays two eggs in a cell. Together they are conclusive.

A laying-worker colony is very hard to rescue, because the laying workers behave as though the colony is queenright and will usually kill an introduced queen. For a small-scale beekeeper the practical answer is usually to combine the remaining bees with a strong queenright colony rather than to spend weeks trying to save it. Prevention is far cheaper than cure, and prevention is simply this: know whether your colonies are queenright, and act early when one is not.

Put the four signals together and you have a working model of colony behaviour. The queen signal says the colony has a future. The brood signal says there is work to do and keeps the workers in their proper role. The Nasonov signal gathers bees to a place. The alarm signal defends. When you open a hive you are interfering with all four at once, which is exactly why an inspection has a cost and should never be done without a purpose.

This is the most important practical lesson in the module, and it starts with a rule that contradicts most beekeeping books you will find in Africa.

A European manual tells you to inspect every 7 to 10 days. Applying that to African bees is a recipe for absconding, which is when the entire colony abandons the nest, brood and all, and leaves. Excessive and rough interference by the beekeeper is a widely reported absconding trigger. Be honest about the evidence: no sourced inspection frequency recommendation for African apiaries was available for this course. What can be justified is the principle.

With African bees, every inspection has a cost. Inspect when you have a question the inspection will answer, or do not open the hive.

What questions justify opening? During build-up: is it queenright, does it need space, is it ready to split. Before the flow: does it have space. At the end of the flow: is there capped honey to harvest. That is most of the list. Curiosity is not on it.

So what do you do the rest of the time? You read the outside of the hive. External observation costs nothing, disturbs nothing, and in a defensive-bee context it is worth far more than it is in Europe. Learn to read these six things.

1. Traffic at the entrance. Compare it with the neighbouring hives at the same hour. A hive with far less traffic than its neighbours on the same morning has a problem worth investigating.
2. Pollen coming in. Bees carrying pollen into a hive are feeding brood. Steady pollen traffic is good evidence of a laying queen without opening anything.
3. Guard behaviour. Bees standing at the entrance challenging arrivals is normal. Bees that ignore intruders, or a hive being entered by bees from elsewhere without challenge, suggests a weak or failing colony being robbed.
4. Dead or crawling bees outside. Bees crawling at the entrance unable to fly, or with deformed crumpled wings, is the classic sign of a virus problem carried by Varroa. Piles of dead bees suggest poisoning.
5. Smell. A healthy hive smells of wax and honey. A sour or foul smell coming from the entrance is a reason to inspect for brood disease.
6. Weight. Heft one end of the hive by lifting it slightly. Do this on every hive on the same day and you learn to feel the difference between a hive with stores and one without. This is your best warning of starvation, and it costs ten seconds.

When you do open a hive, go in with a checklist and get out. Work these eight points in order.

1. Is the colony queenright? The best evidence is eggs, which prove a laying queen within the last three days. You do not need to see the queen.
2. Is the brood pattern solid? Scattered, spotty brood suggests queen failure or brood disease.
3. Is there disease? Sunken, dark, greasy, perforated cappings are the American foulbrood warning. Any brood that looks wrong needs a diagnosis, not a guess.
4. Are there stores? Sealed honey and pollen. A colony with no stores in a dearth will abscond or starve.
5. Is there space? No space during a flow means swarming, or nectar stored in the brood nest.
6. Are there queen cells? Along the bottom edge of the comb means swarm preparation. On the face of the comb means supersedure or emergency replacement.
7. Are there pests? Small hive beetles running from the light, wax moth webbing, ants.
8. Are there laying workers? Multiple eggs per cell, eggs on cell walls, all-drone brood in worker cells.

Eight points, one pass, close up. Write the answers on the colony card at the hive.

Timing matters as much as technique. Defensive behaviour varies with time of day and with season, so the same colony is not equally dangerous at all times. Work late in the day or after dark where local practice supports it, and never on a hot, still or thundery afternoon during a dearth. Kenyan practice puts harvesting between 5.30 pm and 7.30 pm, when the foragers are home and defensiveness is lower.

Before you open anything, smoke the entrance with about 8 to 10 puffs and wait. Have enough fuel to finish the job.

One final habit that separates good beekeepers from busy ones. Before you lift the lid, stand back and ask yourself out loud: what am I going to do with the answer? If you cannot say what action you will take on the basis of what you find, the inspection is not an inspection. It is interference, and with African bees interference is how you lose colonies.