A Tale Of Three Hives

A good hive should have approximately 30,000 workers or preferably more. My number one hive definately has that many. Hive 2 of course had Nozema and is recovering. Hive 3 was given to me by a friend. It was a swarm that he caught and is doing well, but not up to snuff.
The workers do what their name implies. Each worker bee has a special pouch called a honey bag or sac inside its body and they suck up the nectar from the flowers with their long tongues and store it in the honey sac. When it is full, they fly back to their hives and transfer the nectar to house bees who spread it in the honey combs. In the process of storing it in their stomachs and transferring it, enzymes are added to the ncectar and by a process called inversion, the sugar and nectar are broken down into simple sugars. The water in the nectar slowly evaporates, but the bees speed up the process by fanning their wings, setting up currents of air from the hive entrance at the bottom to the ventilation holes at the top. After most of the water is removed and the liquid becomes thick, young worker bees produce beeswax which oozes through small pores in the body and forms white flakes on the outside of the abdomen. Using its legs, the bee then picks theseflakes from the abdomen and transfers them to its jaws and after chewing, caps each honey filled cell in order to preserve it. What a miracle! And we get to enjoy it.