If you build it they will come!

My good friend dropped off my package of bees this morning. I have decided to keep a hive at the house and let my 10 year old son claim them as his own. He was not willing to install the bees into the hive so I did that with my Assistant (daughter) and things went quite smoothly. Probably one of the hardest things (for me at least) is waiting until the early evening to hive them. I will add photos and more later but I wanted to at least get this post started so the correct date was shown.




Here we see the newest beekeeper with his package. We kept them in the garage and he fed them every 2 hours or so by spraying sugar water on them until installation which would take place later this evening.





Here is the new hive in our backyard ready to go. We have not added the bees quite yet. We had frames that were already drawn with comb since we lost a hive in the early winter or late fall. We are quite sure that it was due to MITES.





Here is my seasoned assistant. She wanted to install the package by herself but I thought it would be a good idea to be there just in case. You can see we have a frame of honey from last year ready to go. We will put that in the hive and that should feed them for awhile.






Here she is spraying the package with sugar water and getting ready to "gently" shake them into the hive.






Here we are taking the sugar feeder out. This can feeds the hive until you are ready to install them. It was completely empty when we took it out and it was a bit of a struggle but we eventually got it.





Here is the queen cage. Probably should have zoomed in here for you but you can see it is just covered in BEES. I noticed how they were very calm around the queen so they were probably already accepting her as their queen. The problem is that I did not have a marshmallow at the time so I just installed her until Monday when we put the marshmallow in.





Here I am shaking the rest of the bees out. My assistant had done most of them but was getting a little nervous with all of the ones flying around. If you look closely you will see a huge pile of them.





Within minutes the bees QUICKLY moved down into the combed frames. I have never seen bees take so quickly to a hive! You can see that the piles have already dispersed! They were in and down and already exploring their new home.


We named this hive Carmady and hope she does well her first year in our backyard. There were still about 50 or so bees that did not make it into the hive so we will have to watch them and see if they make it in. The heavy rainfall has not helped in this regard.