Wilson County Beekeepers

Check out this auburn-haired beauty

click the photo for high-resolution image (3 MB)

This is one of the queens Roy Everidge and Ed Holcombe raised back in August.  She was introduced to a split colony through the front entrance of an eight frame medium hive on 20 August, and was released the following afternoon when the workers finally gnawed through the candy end of her cage.  Luckily the bees accepted her and she must have gotten to work right away.  We inspected the colony on Sunday, 11 September 2011 and found four and a half frames of brood in various stages of development, including several thousand capped cells.  She looks almost orange.