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| Bees at the bee store |
My brother-in-law in California enjoys raising bees for honey as a hobby. He was trying to capture a spring swarm of bees to propagate a hive but it failed for some reason. They ended up at the bee store to purchase a queen and some worker bees. Apparently the slightly larger queen bee is in the boxes and those are the worker bees swarming around. They took home a box with the queen and a bunch of worker bees.
Raising bees is quite a study, an educational process as I discovered when I googled 'raising bees'. Worker bees, drone bees and the queen bee form quite the community, everyone has a specific role. There can only be one queen in the hive. Drone bees have one role and that is to impregnate the queen, after which they die. The queen's job is to lay eggs. The workers of course do all the work in the hive. There comes a time as the hive grows, when a new queen will supersede the old queen who will have to leave the hive along with some of the worker bees, in a swarm to find a new home.
