The Honey Pot

The owner is also a very keen beekeeper and has put an Observation Beehive in the Hotel and taken it one step further. He has a live web cam running 24 hours a day and has two cameras running, one at the entrance and the other showing the inside of the hive.
Click below to see it working, you might have to wait a few moments for it to down load. It is also a very good hotel to stay at too.

Gavin at Sysonby Knoll Hotel also keeps about 10 hives near by and his local honey is for sale at The Hotel and also at “Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe”
at Melton Mowbary Town centre.

The Queen Bee

She is the mother to all of the bees in the hive, her job is to lay eggs. She is slightly larger than the worker bees as she has a longer abdomen and legs. She can normally be seen with an escort of about 15 bees encircling her. You might see her inspecting the cells and then placing her abdomen inside as she lays her egg. I have marked her with paint to make her easier to spot and the colour to tell us what year she was born. The queen can live much longer than the worker bees, about three years or longer, but her egg laying reduces after a year or two so a good colony will supercede her before she starts to fail as a good layer.

The queen bee is produced from the same eggs as the worker bee but has a much larger cell to develop in and is fed with plenty of bee milk (Also called Royal Jelly).

The tiny eggs can be seen at the bottom of the cell. They hatch out after three days and then turn in to larvae

These can be seen towards the centre of the hive where it is the warmest, they contain the pupae that hatch out 21 days from being an egg

This can be seen on the legs of the foraging bees returning to the hive, they then rub the pollen off their legs and push it in to the cells more to the outside of the frame. This is stored ready to feed to the developing larvae

All worker bees are female and they are produced from the queen bees fertilised eggs. Their tasks are set out from the moment they are born to the day that they die. In their short life (about six weeks in the summer) their duties start off as : Cell cleaning, brood incubation, feeding larvae, grooming and feeding the queen bee, hive cleaning, comb building, honey ripening, guard duties, air conditioning and after about three weeks they then become foraging bees. Bees are 100% vegetarian/vegan and only collect four things, water, nectar, pollen and propolis. When a worker bee has found a source of food she tells the other foraging bees by doing the “bee dance”. This lets the other bees know how to get to the same location.

These are the male bees and are developed in the hive from early spring to late summer. They are produced from the queen bees unfertilised eggs. Their cells are larger than than worker bees cells.

Their sole task is to mate with new virgin queens. They fly in to “drone assembly areas” where there is a warm thermal of air, they search for a virgin queen to mate with, after they have mated they die.

This can be seen around the top corners of the frames. It is the food of the honey bee. When it has been ripened it is capped over with beeswax.
It started as nectar and then became honey.

This is located at the left hand side of the base. This can be fIlled with sugar syrup to ensure that the bees have sufficient foodstores and helps toreduce the queen bees egg laying rate to help reduce over crowding, in thr observation hive. This feeder is the floating type, the bees walk onto the raft and suck the syrup through the small holes

This is the access to and from the hive where the bees are free to go out side foraging and go on cleansing flights. The square tube is usually decorated with leaves, twigs, or flowers to enable the bees to recognise their new entrance as soon possible on the side of the marquee. The bees soon get used to their new location by flying around the entrance area outside and re adjusting their bearings taking in the land marks such as the sun, trees, buildings and the hole they have flown out from.

This helps the bees to maintain the correct temperature, to cold and the brood can die, to hot and the combs can collapse. We also fit  a heater inside the black plastic tube if we are to over winter the bees in the observation hive, a 12v heater is connected to a car battery if it is too cold. This prevents the brood from chilling.