Hive Sweet Hive

10,000 worker bees and one queen call these stacks of wooden boxes home. Each hive consists of at least one bottom board, two brood chambers, an inner cover and an outer cover. During the summer bloom, one or more top box, or super, is added where the bees store their excess honey for our harvest.

Block Island Bee Hive

Entrance to a hive

Home is Where the Honey Is

Each super consists of 8-10 frames of beeswax honeycomb. In the top supers the bees fill the frames with sealed honey. In the bottom brood chambers, the queen lays eggs and the nurse bees tend to a new generation. At a rate of 3,000 eggs a day, the queen lays in a specific oval pattern with the brood in the center of the frame. The surrounding cells are packed with pollen, and honey. Each baby bee needs one cell of honey and one cell of pollen to reach maturity.

Frames inside super

Frame with worker bees, brood, pollen and honey