April 10: 20,000 Honeybees

On Saturday, we picked up our two packages of bees (each containing about 10,000 honeybees and 1 queen). The sound of 20,000 bees in my car, a constant cacophony of buzzing (that is, before the engine and radio covered it up) was both frightening and fascinating. I tried to drive carefully as to not knock over the packages in the trunk; even though the packages are tightly secured, I had some alarming visions of the packages bursting open and my car being flooded with bees. Safely back at home, we went through the crazy process of installing these packages in our hives. We set up both hives outside, filled the feeders with sugar syrup (6 cups water + 6 cups sugar, divided between the two), filled the beetle busters with vegetable oil to capture any beetles, filled some water containers (we used our baby chick waterers), removed 4 frames in each hive temporarily, and placed half a 'pollen patty' on the remaining frames for the bees to eat. I donned my bee suit (eventually my husband did too, after getting stung. I still can't believe he thought he would be able to help out with this process without wearing his bee suit), grabbed my hive tool and bee brush, and carried the packages from my car to the hives. 

Starting with the yellow hive:

1. Pry open top of package with hive tool. 

2. Remove the queen package (she is in her very own little cage). 

3. Pry open the door of the package. 

4. With one swift movement, dump the bees into the hive. I neglected to remove their food container from the package before dumping, which was a mistake because many of the bees stayed in the package with their food. After removing the feeder, I dumped again, and got out most of the bees. I became immersed in a cloud full of confused bees trying to figure out where to go and where their new home is, which again was both frightening and fascinating. It's a lot of bees. I knocked the package on the hive a few more times to try to get all the bees out, and then left the package next to the hive for any of the leftover bees to eventually fly out on their own and find their new home.

5. Replace the 4 frames I had removed.

6. Poke a little hole into the candy cork on the queen cage to make it easier for the bees to their way through to her. (They eat the candy to release the queen; it's a way for the bees to slowly get used to the pheromones of their queen in order to accept her.)

7. Place queen cage on top of frames.

8. Replace the top layers of the hive: shim, feeder board, inner cover, outer cover.

We waited about 20 minutes for the swarm to die down and then did the blue hive, pretty much exactly the same but a few differences: I remembered to remove the food can before dumping out the bees, and this hive uses a front feeder instead of a feeder board. I did this hive much more quickly and confidently (hopefully the yellow hive will not suffer from my mistakes). 

It was an absolutely gorgeous day for the bees, in the 70s and sunny, and I hope we did everything right to help the bees survive. Each of the hives started with 4 frames of capped honey from our old hives, so hopefully that will give them a good head start, especially as it gets stupidly cold again. We have to wait a whole week before we are able to open up the hives and check on them; fingers crossed they accept their queens and start to build up their homes with comb and brood and honey. 

I used to be afraid of all bees, but now I am in awe of the little honeybee and I completely delight in them. (It's wasps that are the bad guys!) Honeybees are really very docile creatures and the whole bee society they create is fascinating. They are also an integral part of the natural world, so I delight in being able to do my part in protecting the survival of the bee species. 

With delight,

♥Jamie