At the Hive Entrance.

Wide-angle Wednesday, and the theme should be “Glass;” so I’ve failed on that one unless you can find a bee with a glass eye. Since each of these young ladies have five eyes, the odds are slightly higher than you might imagine.
 
I’ve been a little  bit concerned for the last week that there is always this small cluster at the entrance (the narrow horizontal slot between the grey of the old wood that is the floor, and the more orange wood of the hive body) and the cluster increases in size at night by a factor of five or ten. However, the books say that there is nothing to worry about as the bees are probably only keeping the inside temperature down; they regulate it to thirty-five degrees Celsius to incubate the brood. To do this, you would expect them to be fanning their wings to maintain an airflow, but there is no sign of that.
 
The colony has a nice temperament and did not bother me even though I was only about a foot away from their front door; as I’m allergic to bee venom and was unprotected, they are obviously very placid. This might change in a few days when I must medicate them against the varroa mite infestation that is causing some viral diseases that I have noticed. Although it was raining, they were still flying and bringing home pollen to feed their brood, so it’s fairly safe to say that, in general terms, they are healthy in spite of their problems.
 
You may notice that the two circled bees have much less yellow banding on them than most of the others, particularly the single circled one just below; this is because they have a different father; the queen will have mated with at least a dozen drones in her youth. The darker ones are more closely related to the British Black Bee you may have heard about while the yellower ones will have more Italian blood in their veins. Over the next three or four generations, they darker colour will become much more dominant (unless a neighbour imports a yellow breed into the area); the natives are more suited to our environment though precisely which characteristics are being selected - and how - remains a mystery to me but, in my experience, the darker bees fare much better and are much more productive than their lighter cousins.
 
Thanks are due to BobsBlips for hosting today’s challenge, and I promise I’ll check up on the theme for next week.