From Hive to Home: Making and Harvesting Honey - Honeybee: Lessons from an Accidental Beekeeper - page 68

A WORKER BEE GATHERING POLLEN AND NECTAR
A HOUSE BEE ACCEPTING NECTAR FROM A FORAGING BEE
H ONEY SHALLOWS
During the first year of beekeeping, your bees will be busy drawing out the hive's
twenty frames of beeswax foundation into cells for brood rearing and honey and pollen
storage. The worker bees excrete wax from their glands and use it to build cells on the
foundationinsideeachframe.Oncethebeeswaxcellsaredrawnout,thequeenwillstart
laying eggs in the center of the frame as the worker bees begin filling up others at the
topwithnectarformakinghoney.Asthequeenlayseggs,thecolonywillgrowinnum-
ber, building a strong population of worker bees. An enterprising colony of honeybees
will make far more honey than it needs to survive. Honeybees will naturally continue
making honey as nectar and space are available. You do not always have control over
the nectar availability, but you can control the space and give your bees extra room to
make honey.
Youshould never remove honey from the hive's two deeps—the two main boxes are
where the bees live and raise brood—because that's the honey the bees eat and feed to