Today it was just warm enough to work the hives. I opened mine only briefly to make sure the workers had released the queen (they had), and to add some sugar syrup. Matt opened his hive to check on the status of the bees; to see how they are coming along. It was really amazing that after only eight days, the bees had already drawn out lots of comb, are collecting nectar and pollen, the queen has laid eggs, and the larvae are all curled up and growing!
This is the top feeder. You can kind of see the bees drinking the sugar syrup there under the screen.
Matt's busy bees
If you look closely, you can see pollen stored in some of the cells, (the yellowish looking ones), and the little larvae curled up in some of the honey comb cells. It takes seven days between when the egg is laid and when the cell is capped with wax to let the larva grow through it's pupal stage and undergo metamorphasis into an adult bee.
Whoa, I had an exciting evening of beekeeping. We decided to have two hives, so now Matt thinks we are competing with our hives. I'm not sure about how we calculate the "winner." My bees were delivered to the apiary supply store today, so Matt, who has more flexibility at work went and picked them up on his way home. They'd been in their nuc box for 3 days already and the people at the store said we should hive them as soon as we could. We were thinking of waiting until Saturday after I got off from work but that seemed like a long time. The weather was going to be rainy today, Thursday and Friday but nice on Saturday, but I figured we had better just hive them now. It wasn't raining and it was 60 degrees, no time like the present. I wouldn't get home until 6:15 so Matt prepared all my things I would need and made some more sugar syrup to be ready for when I got home. We would be cutting it close as it was getting late in the day.
I decided to wear my bee costume (as I like to call it) and Matt was on video duty. I guess I could have just opened the box and set it into the hive and let them crawl out but I decided to do the dump and shake method. My bees seemed much more clingy than Matt's did. They were crawling all over me! But then right, and I mean RIGHT after the bees were mostly in, it started pouring, and I mean POURING rain. There was drama at the hive because some of the bees were getting soaked and so we quickly put a board up to umbrella the entrance and the nuc box. Quite a few bees decided to stay in the box because the weather was so crazy, so when it let up, Matt opened it up and encouraged them into the hive. They crawled into the hive one after the other. (See video at the bottom). I hope they didn't get too cold and wet.
The video cut off at the end but I put the last frame in, put the top feeder on and then the top on with no squished bees!
This afternoon I snuck into the hive to see if the worker bees had released the queen, and they had. First I lightly smoked the entrance, then I removed the top feeder and cover and used a little smoke to keep the bees off the top of the frames. I removed the empty queen cage. I noticed that the bees have already drawn out some comb on the frames on either side of the queen cage. Later this afternoon, I also saw some bees bringing pollen back to the hive.
Matt went to pick up our package of bees while I was at work on Saturday morning. When he got home he had a small box full of aproximately 10,000 bees. I have never seen such a thing. They were all clustering around the queen (who was in her own little personal box).
We got ready to hive the bees; filling the feeder, and preparing the hive. Matt decided to go with wearing the veil on his head even though he thought it would be "more bad-ass" not to wear it. Here you can see the screen bottom board.
Matt took out two frames so that he could shake the bees into the hive. You can see what a frame looks like here. The bees will be busy building wax comb on the frames where the queen can lay eggs and they can store pollen and honey.
Ok, here are 3 videos of hiving the bees:
Matt Hives the Queen Bee
Matt Hives the Worker Bees
Ethel had to watch from inside the house.
Matt dumped as many bees as he could into the hive, then closed it up.
He set the little box near the hive so the rest of the bees could climb into the hive.
The bees that people get in their apiaries are not really wild and obviously not tame. They have been bred to have certain traits, like gentleness. We will have "italian" bees in our hives. Our neighbor asked if they drive Ferraris. Yes, they do. But because we invest in these bees, we want them to have a chance to survive so, in the spring, when the nectar flow is low, we can help our bees by feeding them sugar syrup. Once spring and summer are in full flow, the bees can get enough food for themselves.
A friend of mine gave us a happy beekeeping gift: a 25 lb bag of sugar! How sweet of her.
The weather has still been too cold in California where our bees will be coming from, so their arrival is still delayed. Though this gave us time to really finish preparing our bee corner. We planted some plants and flowers that the bees will really like and that we like too.
I saved the lillies and the astibile that were next to the shed before and replanted them in the bee corner. We also planted salvia, lavender, flax, wall flowers, penstemon, geranium, lupine, lady's mantle, bacopa, sweet alyssum, nemesia, bee balm, and a blueberry that I had in a pot. We are going to add some grass to the bottom where the dirt is and then have margaritas.
We debated a lot about where to put our bees. Here in the Northwest, the more sun the better so they can keep warm. The front yard gets the most sun, but it is facing the street and the neighbors. We decided that the backyard would be better even though it's a little shady in the morning. Then we can check on the bees in our sexy net hats in private, and people won't freak out about having bees in the neighborhood, even though the bees are nice.
We have a shed that we had been thinking about taking down because it's leaky and getting pretty old, so we decided to put the bees there instead of making a seating area. Here are the pictures of "operation: take the shed down". We should be getting bees next weekend so we had to work fast.
After taking a beekeeping course at Beez Neez in Snohomish, WA, Matt and I passed our test and are official beekeepers! Well, not really official because we don't have any bees yet, but they will be here soon and then we will be doing some experiential learning. We are excited and nervous!
