Building a nest with bees
Under natural conditions, the newly formed family of bees (swarm), settling in a suitable place for housing, for example, in the hollow of a tree, a cave, a cleft of a rock, etc., is immediately taken to be a nest of wax.
The allocation of wax is associated with a certain age of bees and environmental conditions, especially with a bribe.
The most intensively produced wax are young bees, feeding brood and processing nectar. They eat well themselves and because at this time they develop well and work wax glands. In the spring, as soon as there is at least a small bribe, the bringing and processing of nectar, immediately in normal families begins the detuning of the combs. Beekeepers need to use this circumstance.
The bees that are produced by bees are of white color. This color is obtained and freshly rebuilt honeycomb, but later the honeycombs under the influence of propolis, honey, perga and brood, located in the cells, turn yellow and acquire a pleasant honey smell. Over time, the honeycomb becomes brown, dark brown at last, black.
During a bribe, when the bees eat abundantly, the wax intensively stands out, and bees easily build honeycombs.
On the contrary, in wintry times with a poor diet, wax is very weak. If bees are forced at such a time to build honeycombs, then they begin to eat intensively to separate the wax.
Wax glands, like other glands, work involuntarily and if the beekeeper does not create conditions for using the allocated wax, the wax will be lost by bees at the bottom of the hive or in the field at the time of flight. Therefore, the beekeeper must not only be able to collect the wax that stands out from the bees, but also put the family in such conditions that the bees give as much wax as possible.
Wax glands reach the greatest development in bees of 12-18-day-old age.
In a time-free period, bees are reluctant to accept the construction
Honey-pergovaya top dressing contributes to the increased allocation of bees wax and accelerates the construction of honeycombs. In natural conditions, bees begin to “pull a new thing,” that is, build honeycombs, usually from top to bottom.
In beehive conditions, some bee families partially build the honeycomb not only from the top down, but also from the bottom up or to the side.
Coming to the construction of honeycombs, or, as the beekeepers say, to the lifting of waxes, bees cling to their legs one by one and, forming garlands, or chains, hang in the place where there is an opportunity to begin construction. With such beating of the bees, the temperature rises to 36 њ.
The bees remove the wax plates from the stems with the help of the brush of the posterior pair of legs, then, bending the posterior leg forward, passes the plate to the front legs, after which the wax plate is wetted with saliva and kneaded with jaws (upper jaws) well adapted for this purpose. After that, the bee sculpts honeycomb.
Bees, are in the construction in the hanging position of their weight give the cells a vertical (sheer) direction. Bees provided to themselves, for example, in shelves or decks, produce the construction of honeycombs in this way. The bees gathered on the ceiling begin to stick together the wax lumps one by one to the place from where they will start building the honeycomb.
This results in a wax strip (roller or scallop). The bees continue to put on pieces of wax, which makes the wax strip already erect with a hanging uneven wax plate to 5 mm in thickness, on which the bees begin to form cells. At the same time, they gnaw on both sides rounded depressions, giving them then a pyramidal shape.
These grooves are the bottom of the cells. By gnawing depressions, the bees put the wax on the edges, and thus the beginning of the walls of the cells is obtained. With the addition of new wax plates, the cell walls are extended to the desired size.
The depth of the bee cell of the newly constructed honeycomb is 1.1 to 13 mm, and the width is on the average 5.37 mm.
The depth of the tartar cells is 16.5 mm, and the width, on average, is 6.9 mm. The thickness of the newly built bee honeycomb ranges from 21.5 to 25.5 mm, but with the use of an artificial honeycomb, the thickness increases slightly.
Fig. 29. A – the bee that takes out the wax plate; B – the bee that transmits the wax plate to the front legs; B – the back leg of a working bee with a wax plate pinned on bristly hairs.
Four square bees are placed on one square centimeter. Trutnev same cells on a square centimeter are placed three.
The honeycomb is an extremely light structure. From 0.5 kg of wax bees build up to 40-42 thousand cells. Bee and drone cells can serve not only for the brood’s withdrawal, but also for the folding of honey, and bees, in addition, for folding the pegs. When building honeycombs, bees can not immediately move from small bees to large drone cells, and therefore on the border of those and other wounds are forced to build irregular cells, for example, pentahedral or irregular hexahedral ones.
Such cells are called transitional cells. They often remain empty, sometimes filled with honey.
The cells by which the honeycomb is attached to the upper and lateral slats of the frame have only five faces, of which four faces touch adjacent cells, and the fifth face with the bar. These cells are called extreme cells.
Location of the honeycomb in the nest. In a new housing a bee is immediately built up a few honeycombs. Cells are located in the nest at a certain distance from each other so that between them are obtained small spaces – the streets. These streets are about 12 mm wide, so the bees can freely move between the cells. The thickness of the honeycomb plus the street is 35-37 mm. Usually such a distance is observed by bees when building honeycombs without frames. This should be taken into account when arranging the frames in the socket.
Bees left to themselves, in most cases, build the honeycomb so that they can be located not flat, but the edge to the tap hole, rarely diagonally to the tap. If you paste pieces of honeycomb parallel to the wall, which has a chute, then the bees will rebuild honeycombs, and flatten to the tap.
Since bees without human participation usually arrange their nest with a cold drift, then with rational beekeeping, it is necessary to reckon with the instinct of bees and put frames in the beehives with a honeycomb not flat but with a rib to the tap. In this case, the ventilation of the hive will be done well and correctly, and this is an indispensable condition for a successful wintering.
In addition, in the summer, proper air refreshment in the hives favors the successful development of the family, and, consequently, the good collection of honey. At the edges of the honeycombs, and if necessary, and in the middle of them, bees in the swarm period build the largest, round cells in the form of cups of acorn, the so-called uterine bowls, which always face downwards and serve for the withdrawal of queens.
When the uterus puts the egg in the bowl, the bees begin to build this bowl, as the uterine larva grows, into a large cell like an acorn. Such a cell is called a queen cell. The walls of the mother cell are much thicker than the walls of other cells. In spite of the fact that every mother is built by bees always in a vertical direction, with a hole downward, the uterine larva does not fall out of it, because it is always surrounded by a rather thick milk that holds it.
To seal cells filled with honey, bees use pure wax and print so that in most cases the sides of the cells become almost invisible, and the caps almost completely merge.
To seal the brood, bees are mixed with propolis and pergus to the wax, which makes the caps on brood bees usually light-brown and never white. The lids on the printed bee brood are sharply separated from one another, so that the outlines of the cells are noticeable.
The lobes above the drone brood are more convex than over the bee. If the convex lids rise above the bee cells, then this is a sign that drones are found in such bee cells. This happens in cases when the uterus becomes drone. Such a brood is called a humpback. Thus, by how cells are sealed, you can easily find out what is in them.
In a new dwelling with a fetal uterus, the bees build first only bee wax, and only after a sufficient amount of this wax has been built up, the bees pass to the building of the droned wax. With a good bribe, a strong family can rebuild 1-2 frames of an artificial honeycomb per day.
A natural swarm with a young fetus almost does not at all build drone honeycombs in the first year of its settlement. Roy with the old uterus may soon proceed to the construction of honeycombs with drone cells.
Bees in bezmatamochnyh families usually do not build honeycomb. If they are forced to build, then they pull in the form of small tongues exceptionally drone cells with very thick, sometimes curved walls in the cells.
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