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A wooden bee hive with three stacked boxes and bees flying in and out the front entrance.

🐝 ApiaryPosted June 11, 2026

Added the first honey super

The bees filled the bottom boxes. Time to give them upstairs space.

Field notes

Inside this hive there are about 50,000 bees right now. They've packed the bottom two boxes with brood (baby bees) and honey for themselves. So today we added a third box on top — called a 'super' — for the honey we get to harvest.

If the nectar flow keeps up, they'll fill that box with about 30 pounds of honey by August.

The learning

What's actually happening

How a bee makes honey

A worker bee visits up to 100 flowers per trip and sips nectar into a special 'honey stomach'. Back at the hive she passes it mouth-to-mouth to another bee, who adds enzymes and fans her wings to evaporate the water. When it's down to about 18% water, it's honey. They cap it with beeswax.

One teaspoon = a bee's whole life

A single worker bee lives about 6 weeks in summer and makes roughly 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. That jar in your kitchen is the life work of hundreds of bees.

Words to know

Hive: The home where a colony of bees lives.
Super: An extra box added to a hive to collect surplus honey.
Nectar: The sweet liquid flowers make to attract pollinators.
Worker: A female bee that does all the food gathering. Most bees in a hive are workers.

Your turn

Make your guesses

Enroll a kid to save guesses.

Guess

If this super fills up with 30 pounds of honey, how many honey bears (12 oz each) is that?

Hint: There are 16 ounces in a pound.

Pick one

What does the queen bee do all day?

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