Royalty! The Dark Queen Reveals Herself

This hive has been so rewarding.  I love to listen to the peaceful hum, and on good days when the nectar is flowing, you can smell the honey being made.  I've watched rounds of new bees hatch and new brood develop, have monitored the comings & goings, watched the multi-colored pollen come in and be made into bee bread in the brood area, nectar be deposited, and then consumed,  and watched these energetic ladies draw new comb.

Here is a series of pictures of a couple of new bees thinking of emerging.

Up, down!  It's a struggle.

   

 

 

 

I see this happen all the time in the OH, but I still don't take such good pictures of it;
I took these pictures outdoors in another hive.

The brood fills in an oval, then empties from the center out, and repeats.  That tells me they were successful in raising a queen from the young brood I placed in the hive, but weeks go by and I don't see her highness.

I have read that the bees can make wax more efficiently if they are in a dark environment, so I keep a cover over the hive when I am not watching the activities.  Here they have begun drawing comb in the 3rd frame up.

Capped & open brood, nectar and pollen.

Colorful pollen above and below brood.  The bottom frame  is from last year's brood nest.
The wax becomes darker as it is re-used.

Now they have drawn comb on all of the frames in the hive.  

The busy tube to the outdoors.  They navigate about 5' of tube.
I drilled small holes in it every inch or so because they had problems with condensation.
The holes allow the moisture to escape.

The bottom 2 sets of frames (there are 8 frames, 2 at each level) are full of brood.
The top 2 sets are newly drawn and currently are being filled with nectar.

the other side

nectar

Bright orange pollen being stored among the brood.
They ran short on open cells for a bit and have had a very busy wax-making week.

If you are using my plans to build a hive, I left more than bee space at the bottom.   I wondered if that was a mistake. You might want to leave less.  Here you can see the bees have drawn some comb suspended from the bottom bar of the lowest frame.  This is drone comb, as would be expected.  It will be interesting to see if it is used for storage, or always for drones.  It is new yesterday.  I expect it will first be used for drones, as there are very few drone cells elsewhere.

 AND... drumroll, please!  Presenting our Dark Queen!

In the center of this picture you can see the queen with her court.
She was busily evaluating and depositing eggs into the cells the bees had cleaned and prepared.
Under the bottom rung of the frame you can see the thick crowd of festooning bees stimulating their wax glands. 

The dark queen and her court.

I consider this hive a great success so far.  If I did nothing more with them but watch, and possibly add a feeder if & when food sources dry up, they would become crowded and need to swarm.  I can carry the hive outdoors to tend it, but I have not needed to.
I cut a hole in the center top of this hive before putting the bees in, and I hope to make a 'honey super' before they fill the 4 frames they have newly drawn.  The hole on the top is plugged.  I will cut a matching hole in the small super, align the holes, remove the plug and allow the bees to enter the super to deposit honey. The super would be just 2 frames side-by-side, so would be light & easy to remove & take outdoors to harvest the honey and give them new empty frames to work on.