What Bee Eggs Look Like and How To Identify Brood at Every Stage

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to give you a close-up look inside a frame of bees. So we're going to use this microscope here. It's got a recording function, it's sending it to my phone over there. I'm going to give you a real super in-depth look inside a frame of bees. I'm going to show you capped brood, I'm going to show you larvae, I'm going to show you eggs, I'm going to show you all the different phases of bees. We'll do a couple of close-ups of some pollen shots as well. In my videos, I've always struggled to do this, so I've got this new piece of technology that I've gone out and paid for myself, and I'm just going to put it through its paces. So I'm just going to give you that in-depth shot into what a frame of brood in all stages looks like under a microscope. So we'll jump straight into it then. This microscope here cost me about £70. It fluctuates a little bit on Amazon. It's up to 1,000x magnification microscope is what it says on the box. There's no way I'm getting anywhere near 1,000x magnification, but I'm so impressed with this little gizmo. What it does is it gives you a screen at the front here and it gives you a live feed of what you're doing. And the lag time between what you're actually doing and what you get on this live feed Is tiny, so it's really, really useful. The reason that I've bought this is to show you how I'm going to graft larva, but I thought I'd just do a quick run-through early on in the year, give you a look inside one of the brood frames just to put it through its paces. It's got a light function underneath there and it's got a recording function as well, so you can beam it live to an Android phone, you can beam it live to a TV, and then it's got an SD card storage already in it, 32 gig, and you can record videos of what you're putting underneath the microscope and That is what you're going to see on today's videos. Comes out at 1080p, really good high-quality images, and I hope you enjoy what you see in this video. Right, so the first thing I'm going to show you is a polished cell, and it might seem a bit of a strange thing to start off with, just an empty cell, but the first thing that bees do is they polish the cells ready for the queen to lay. So you might not go in straight away and see eggs, but you might see these polished cells, and that's an indication that the queen's getting ready to lay. Now the eggs are tiny. They're very difficult to see with the naked eye. That's why something like this is so, so useful. What I'm using here is a grafting tool, and I'll just put the grafting tool back into this image here just so you can actually see what's going on with the grafting tool. And you can see how magnified this image is and how small the eggs are. So you really don't need to feel too bad if you can't see eggs. They're tiny, especially when they're just laid. As you can see, they're kind of oblong shape, a little bit oval. They're not like circular eggs. They're very stretched out. They almost look like little hyphens or little dashes. So I'm just going to put the grafting tool back in just so you can see the difference between what an egg looks like and the size of the tip on the grafting tool. Just wanted to show you this image here because this, you often get this, you often get an egg standing up in the cell. So instead of seeing the fully laying flat egg, it's tilted up at an angle like that. So you don't even see that much more of it. Can make it very, very difficult to see unless you've got good magnifying glasses on or you've got very, very good eyesight. And there's another couple of eggs as well. I just wanted to show you a few different eggs in a few different orientations to show you they don't always lay them in the center, they don't always lay them perfectly lying down, they can be at all angles. What you're looking for though is individual eggs in the cell. As soon as you start to see numerous eggs in the cell, then you've got a little bit of an issue. You're probably looking at either a misfiring queen, something she might sort out herself, or more likely laying workers. So this is what you're looking for. You're looking for one egg in the cell, preferably in the middle. Doesn't really matter where it is. Makes it a little bit easier to spot if it's in the middle. So we move on to a larva then. So obviously after 3 days, the egg hatches out and it becomes a larva. And what you're looking to see at this stage, if you've got a healthy colony, is a nice pool of royal jelly. And royal jelly is that white fluid that sits in the bottom of the cell. lubricates it and feeds the larva in its early stages of its life. Again, I'm just going to get the, the end of the grafting tool in there just so you can see how small these larvae are. They're really, really small. This is a stainless steel grafting tool, not one that I use. I prefer the Chinese grafting tools that I'm going to show you in a separate video. But as you can see, they're really, really tiny, will just about fit on the end of the grafting tool. What you can see in there though, it is a very small larva, absolutely tiny. Lots of royal jelly, and that larva is going to consume that royal jelly and become nice and fat and chubby. So this larva here is eating away at that royal jelly, building up its size, still not filling the cell, probably a couple of days older than the previous image that I just showed you. And then as they get bigger and bigger, they come to fill that cell. And as you can see, they pretty much consumed all of that royal jelly, all of the good stuff that the bees have been feeding them. They get to the point where the bees are coming close to capping them over, and this is what you'd expect to see. This, I just want to bring it up at this point, this is way, way too big for grafting at this point. I'm going to cover this in the grafting video, but don't think just because you can see the larva here with your naked eye, that's the one to go for. A queen grafted with a larva this size is way, way too late. You want to get that larva as soon as it's turned into a larva, really as soon as you possibly can. To give the bees the best chance when you put it into the queen cups to feed it the correct stuff to turn it into a well-mated queen. You see this, you get queens that are a bit stubby and you get queens that are really big and well-mated. And a lot of that is to do with the mating and a lot of that is to do with how well they are fed and a lot of that is to do with how young you can graft them. So we'll cover all of that in the grafting video, but I just thought I'd pick that one up. So there you go. I've just zoomed out a little bit, give you a bit of a perspective of how these cells look like when they're next to each other. Again, these are all my images from this microscope, which is fantastic. You can see my little grafting tool going across the frame there. It's such a cool, neat tool. So this is what your larvae are going to look like just before they're capped over. They're big, they're chubby, they're well fed, and then they're going to go into the capped phase, and then they're going to emerge as young bees. So then the worker bees have done all of their hard work, nurse bees feeding up those larvae until they get to the point where they cap them over with wax. And what you can see on the image here is a capped worker brood cell. And then just to the right of it, you can see that obviously a bee has recently emerged and then the queen's gone back in there and laid another egg. So this cycle is very much iterative, and this is what I want to pick up on. It's brood in all stages. So when you pick out a frame, every single cell is pretty much time-bound by when the queen laid that egg, and they work through a natural cycle. So when you hear the term brood in all stages, That's what it means. It means you're going to see day-old eggs, eggs that are 2 to 3 days old, young larva, old larva, capped brood, uncapped brood, and emerging bees. That's what brood in all stages means, and brood in all stages is a really healthy sign of a colony because it means that they're replenishing the dying bees and it means that the queen is working well. Right, so that's it. That is brood in all stages. A couple of interesting things to show you on this frame that isn't brood in all stages. Obviously you've got pollen. So when the bees go out, they collect the pollen, they mix it with honey, they mix it with stores, they turn it into bee bread, and then they store it in the cells like that. So that's what you're seeing there. That is a natural mix of pollen and honey mixed up to be stored in the cells, and they feed that to young bees. And then next to it, you've got nectar. So they've been going out, they've been foraging liquid nectar, and they're bringing that back in and they're storing that in the outer rim of these frames. So there you go. That's it for the video. This is my favorite new toy. I'm putting pretty much everything I own underneath it at the moment and taking a close-up shot of it. It's a cheap Chinese-branded microscope with a live view feed that makes it really, really easy to look inside the cells, actually see what's going on for once. I'll put my Amazon Associate link up at the end. Any clicks we get through the Amazon Associate link will earn us a small commission for the channel, so we appreciate your support. So something a little bit different for today, a look inside a brood frame to see the brood in all stages under a microscope. So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.