Photos from the Farm #23

Welcome back!

Your teacher brought me your questions! Thank you so much for measuring your papers so that I can scan them easily. I won't be answering questions this week, I'll pick some to answer next week.

This week I sent a frame for "Farm Friday Show and Tell."

It's not the kind of frame that holds a picture on a wall, it's the kind of frame that bees use to hold honey, pollen, and eggs.

This is the inside cover. It rests on top of the super that holds the frames.
A super is the box that holds all the frames.
There is a picture of the super later.

Do you see the dark stuff on the edge of the frame? That is called propolis. The bees gather a hard, sticky substance from some trees. They use it like glue! They fill any space or crack between frames with proplis. It is a strong glue!

If a spot is smaller than 1/4" the bees will fill it with propolis to close the space. If the space is bigger than 3/8" they will fill it with burr comb.

The yellow spots that look like wax on the lid is wax! We call it burr comb because the bees have build some honey comb in a spot that we don't want honey comb. They have filled the space between the top of the frames and the lid.

This is the top of the super after the lid is taken off. How many frames do you see in the super?
Do you see the burr comb on top of the frames?

This is what it looks like when we pull the frame from the hive. The frame is stuck in the super because the bees have glued it in with propolis.

Pollen is food for bees. Bryon said it is 'protein.' People eat protein when we eat meat and beans and eggs. Bees don't eat those types of food, they eat pollen and honey. 

Bees make honey for food. They store their food for the winter. They usually make more honey than they need for the winter. We take the extra honey for our family! 

This is what the frame looks like after it has been filled with honey.

The bees cover the honey with wax so it doesn't drip out of the hive. We say that they have 'capped' the honey because they put a wax cover on it.

This is what the super looks like when the frame is pulled out of the hive.
All of the frames are full of honey.

Each of the frames has about 3 pounds of honey and about 1 once of wax. The super above has about 24 pounds of honey in it.

If your mom buys flour in big bags, the super weighs about as much as a big bag of flour. It weighs a little less than a 2 year old child weighs.


Our super is full of honey but there are no bees. We don't know what happened to our bees this year. They didn't die because there are no dead bees around the hive. Bees don't usually leave the hive in the winter. Ours left sometime in January. We don't know where they went!