Glossary

The words beekeepers use, as the game uses them.

Brood: Eggs, larvae and sealed pupae. Eggs hatch in 3 days; a worker emerges on day 21. Seeing eggs means a queen was there in the last three days.
Brood box: The bottom box, where the queen lays and the colony keeps its own food.
Burn test: Light one candle for an hour per inch of its width and look at the melt pool: 6-13 mm deep, right to the wall, is the right wick. Shallower tunnels, deeper soots.
Capped honey: Bees seal each cell with wax once the honey is ripe (under about 18% water). Uncapped honey ferments in the jar.
Colony: One queen, tens of thousands of workers and a few hundred drones, living as one organism. A hive is the box; the colony is what lives in it.
Dead-out: A hive whose colony has died. The comb and any honey stay, and a passing swarm may move in.
Drone layer: A queen who has run out of stored sperm, or mated badly, lays only drones: domed cappings scattered in worker cells. The bees can't raise a replacement from drone eggs, so the keeper has to requeen.
Faded colony: Most colonies that die in a winter don't die of one thing you can point at. Viruses left behind by last summer's mites, nosema, a failing queen, pesticides from a field nearby: the colony just gets smaller. Old dark comb, weak colonies and imported queens raise the odds; young comb, strong colonies and hardy local queens lower them. An inspection can catch one shrinking in its last weeks, and uniting it into a strong colony saves its bees and stores.
Heft: Lifting the back of the hive to feel its weight: a quick way to judge the winter stores without opening it.
June gap and dearth: Lulls between flows. In August's dearth, strong colonies rob weak ones and wasps get bold.
Laying workers: After about four weeks without a queen or young brood, some workers start laying unfertilised eggs: several to a cell, stuck to the walls. The colony thinks it is queenright and usually kills an introduced queen. The fix is to unite it with a queenright colony.
Mite wash: Shake about 300 bees in alcohol or sugar and count the mites that fall: 2 or more per 100 means treat.
Nectar flow: The weeks when flowers give nectar faster than the bees eat it. Fruit blossom and hawthorn in May, lime in July, ivy in autumn.
Queen: The only egg-layer: up to 1,500-2,000 eggs a day at the peak. She mates once, in her first weeks, and lives two to five years.
Queen cells: Big peanut-shaped cells: the colony is raising new queens. On the frame edges in May, a swarm is days away.
Split / nuc: A small colony made from a big one: a few frames of brood, bees and food, with a queen or the means to raise one.
Stores: The colony's own honey. About 28 kg sees a colony through a temperate winter.
Super: A box on top for the surplus honey: your crop. Bees need room there when the flow is on, or they get crowded and think about swarming.
Swarming: How colonies reproduce: the old queen leaves with half the bees to start again elsewhere. Beautiful, and half your honey flying away.
Treatment window: Times when treatments work best: early spring, and after the summer crop comes off, before the winter bees are raised.
Uniting: Putting two colonies together, one on top of the other with a sheet of newspaper between. By the time they've chewed through, they smell alike and don't fight.
Varroa: A parasitic mite, the biggest killer of colonies today. It breeds in the brood and spreads viruses. Every colony has some.
Wax and cappings: Bees make wax from glands on their bellies. Cappings, the wax lids sliced off at extraction, are the cleanest wax you'll get.
Wax moth: Moths whose larvae tunnel through stored comb, leaving silk webbing. A strong colony keeps them out; comb in a shed is fair game from May to November. A day in a freezer kills eggs and larvae.
Winter cluster: Below about 14°C the bees huddle into a ball, shivering to keep warm and eating their stores. Don't open the hive.
Workers and drones: Workers are sterile females doing every job; drones are males, raised in spring and summer only to mate, and thrown out in autumn.