This is my youngest (2.5) holding a drone bee. I was okay with this because drones, or males, do not have stingers. The drone holding went a LONG way towards making both of my children more comfortable with the whole idea of having bees.
This is a worker bee. All workers are female, and they can sting. But only once. A worker starts her adult life as a nurse bee taking care of the babies, graduates to being a guard bee protecting the cave, and ends her life as a forager collecting pollen and nectar. And all of this happens in the course of six weeks or so.
This is a drone bee, the males that don't work or sting. They are basically "hive potatoes", LOL. You can tell the difference between the workers and the drones by the size (drones are bigger) and the eyes (drones have large, rounded, almost cartoonish eyes).
This is from my first inspection (which I will post about at a later date). You can see that the bees have started to "draw comb" or create honeycomb up at the top corner, used to store honey and grow new babies.
I think I'm most proud of this picture. I sat in front of the hive for forty five minutes for this shot. Bees fill their "pollen baskets" with pollen and bring it back to the hive. Only problem is, they are so heavy with it sometimes they crash land, and they are in a hurry to get in the hive and get it unloaded. It's really hard to be able to both spot a pollen carrier and then get a picture of her, because she is in constant motion. But this one seemingly posed right in front of me! You can clearly see the pollen baskets on the rear legs. They look like swimmies. This bee is actually Joel's bee. How do I know that? After I took the picture she entered his hive. This was not too long after I had my own hive debaucle, so I'm convinced that my bees wanted nothing less than to help me get a good pollen shot.
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