Honeybees

Friend, Sherman Schlichting, and I tried to capture this colony of honeybees that had made a hive under the floor of an old dilapidated house.  We cut out the honeycombs and wired them into standard bee frames and placed them into a new wooden hive box. We didn't find the queen but hoped that we had overlooked her and that we had transferred over to the new hive on one of the honeycombs.  The goal is to get the queen in the new box and all the workers will follow. We had no such luck... the queen must have flown off because all the worker bees left. We ended up with an empty hive box full of honeycombs.  We were disappointed that we didn't get a hive of bees, but we didn't come up empty-handed as we were able to collect a couple quarts of good tasting honey.

                                  Notice the yellow pollen sacs on this worker bee