Beekeeping Terms beginning with R

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Rapid Feeder

a box or tub containing liquid feed that the bees access by climbing over a dam e.g. Ashforth and Miller types, or by resting on a floating piece of wood as in the frame feeder design. The tub or box is generally placed over the hole in a crown board but can be placed directly on the top bars of the frames.

Requeening

if a colony is not thriving, if it has certain diseases e.g. chalkbrood, the beekeeper may attempt to improve the state of the colony by introducing a new queen and disposing of the old one. Colonies are also requeened if they are bad tempered or to produce a colony with greater tendency to produce a honey suplus.

Royal Jelly

a protein rich substance produced by the hypopharangeal glands of worker bees. All bee larvae are fed royal jelly for the first 3 days after they hatch from eggs. Only a queen larva continues to receive exclusively royal jelly until her cell is capped. This highly protein rich substance is what makes the queen what she is, she matures more quickly than a worker and from egg to emerging from her cell takes only 16 days. Royal Jelly is all a queen is ever fed, as a larva and also as an adult. She is fed by her entourage of bees and in the summer when she is at the height of her laying she can lay twice her own body weight in eggs per day and thus needs vast quantities of this protein rich substance. There is no known benefit to humans of applying externally or eating royal jelly.