Stinky Sugar Syrup: Moonshine Bees?

This last week's inspection was less eventful; however, I learned a lesson regarding feeding sugar syrup. My sugar syrup had fermented. It was cloudy and smelled bad. At first I wasn't sure if it had fermented, my nose must have gotten used to the smell, but upon showing the top feeder to a friend of mine, he and I were convinced that the syrup was bad. So, even though it was close to 8 or 8:30 p.m. I dumped the sugar syrup (just sprayed the bees with sugar syrup and didn't bother smoking them). I then replaced a new gallon of sugar syrup. I did learn several things regarding feeding sugar syrup on the www.beemaster.com forums. 1) Feeding after May 1st is generally a bad idea (unless the weather has been bad--which it has been very rainy). 2) Feed smaller amounts and try to use a feeding system that causes less drowned bees. (I may need to switch to an upside down bucket feeder.) I should have cleaned out the hive top feeder better before I added the new syrup though. Essentially, I'm not going to be adding any more syrup now. Either they'll finish off the syrup that I've added or it will end up fermenting as well and I'll have to toss it as well. That would be a bummer/waste of sugar syrup. Oh well, I'm learning.

Here's the pictures I took during the inspection. It's been uncannily easy to find the queen. 

 Above: You can see the longer abdomen on the queen here. Queens take 16 days to develop and actually develop faster than any of the other castes of bees (worker, drone, queen). Part of what determines whether a female egg becomes a queen is her diet. Worker bees after 3 days get switched to a less nutritious diet, queen's are raised entirely on royal jelly (secreted from glands on the worker bees). Here the queen is busy laying eggs.

Note the queen's abdomen in the cell where she is in the act of laying an egg. A queen bee can lay her weight in eggs in a day (that can be up to 3,000 eggs a day!)

This bee is exposing it's Nasonov gland (at the tip of the abdomen) and fanning with its wings. This pheromone is used to help bees that are lost (perhaps during moving around the deeps during the inspection) to find the hive.

In this picture you notice that there are quite a few bees with their heads buried in the cells. I was wondering why this was the case, then someone on the forums reminded me that when you first smoke the hive, this induces the bees to go in and start eating honey/nectar. This is because they think they are going to have to abandon the hive soon. A bee with a full stomach is a gentle, happy bee. So these bees are likely chowing down on nectar because of the smoke. The other cool thing about this picture, is that if you look in the bottom right quadrant you'll see a bee that is in the process of emerging from it's cell. It is starting to chew through the capping wax. Definitely cool!

In this picture, the bullet looking capped cell that bulges out more than the others is a drone cell. This is a male honey bee. Male honey bees have no stingers. Their eyes are huge! This is because the sole purpose of the drone is to impregnate queens and its eyes are optimized to be able to spot queen bees on mating flights. Drones congregate in what are called Drone Congregation Areas usually in meadows 30 ft. or so in the air. Virgin queens somehow are able to seek these out based on pheromones that the drones emit. When the drones spot a queen they quickly chase and try to mate with the queen. The queen will mate with up to 12 or so drones. After each drone mates, it's male member remains in the queen and is ripped off and the drone dies and plunges to the earth. It's easy to note drone bees. They are much less common, but they are larger than worker bees and their eyes wrap up around their head and meet on the top of the head.

A frame full of capped brood. Beautiful.

 That sticky orange stuff on the side of the frame is propolis. Bees use it to seal up the hive.

An odd looking protrusion of drawn out comb. I don't think this is a queen cell (that would be a bad sign--a sign that the bees think that my queen is doing poorly).

The Heights Honey Apiary! It's coming along! Hopefully that syrup will help them, it will get used before it ferments, and that they'll finish drawing out the frames in deep 1 and deep 2 (won't happen this week, but I'm excited for it!)