After much anticipation, preparation, reading and a week-long 20 hour class at UT, the bees have arrived and been hived! I initially ordered two packages from Smoky Ridge Apiaries, however, after meeting with and speaking with my new bee mentor, I changed one of the packages to a Nuc. So I have one package hive and one nuc hive. Don’t worry, bee happy! Read on where I will explain what the heck I am talking about! So without further ado, here’s the buzz on the bees!
First, the package hive. I picked up my package of bees which is a 3 lb. box of bees with a marked queen. Three pounds of bees equals about 10,000-12,000 bees. Yes, ten to twelve THOUSAND! I picked up this buzzing box of bees on Wednesday, April 29, 2015 around 11:30 in the morning. I strapped it into the bed of the pick ’em up truck and brought them home. I put them down by the hive had lunch and then got all my beekeeping stuff so I could install them. All of my beekeeping “stuff” included my jacket, gloves, spray bottle with sugar-water, hive tool and a pint jar of sugar-water. I have since switched out the pint jar for a quart jar and have switched to smaller gloves that actually fit. The sugar-water is a 1:1 ratio which I made 2 gallons worth and put it in a drink cooler so that it is easy to fill jars and the spray bottle. I also put some Honey B Healthy in it which has essential oils and spearmint to attract the bees. The jars have tops with little holes to let the sugar-water out slowly so you don’t drown the bees.
Off to install the bees I go! I took out about 5 frames within my deep 10 frame brood box. They make lots of sizes of boxes and you can use deeps or mediums for your fist boxes and you can use those with 10 frames, 8 frames and probably smaller. We chose 10 frame deeps for the brood box. Initially I was going to put a 10 frame medium as a second brood box (brood=babies/new bees) but have decided to use two 10 frame deeps. I want the hives as big and strong as possible this year! Anyway, back to the installation. Once I calmed down and had my suit on with my gloves, I put the entrance feeder with the jar on it into the entrance along with my entrance reducer (I will explain these a little later) and I sprayed the box with sugar-water to calm them and distract them. Then I opened up the top and took out the feeding can and the queen box and put them to the side once I saw my queen was alive and marked. Now for the package….I did a “bump and dump” where I bumped the box on the ground to get everyone off the top of the box and turned it over and dumped the bees into the hive. I had to whack the sides a couple of times to get most of the remaining bees (at least all that I could get) out of the box and into the hive. I put the box next to the entrance on the ground so that the reset of them could find their way out of the box and into the hive over the next day or so (which they did). Once the bees were in a heap in the bottom of the hive, I attached the queen box to a frame with some elastic and put that frame into the hive followed by the other 4 frames. I gently put the frames on top of the heap ‘o bees and they readily got out of the way. I put the inner cover and then the outer cover back on and stepped back to take a breath since I had just installed a package of bees for the first time, by myself (thus, not many pictures)!
Ok, so you are wondering about the queen box (how in the world does she get out???), feeding and the entrance reducer. First the queen box: she’s got about 4-6 attendants in there to keep her company and to feed her until they are ready to let her out. There are two corks, one on each end and some fondant candy
on one end as well. I removed the cork on the candy end. Since I left the hive alone until Sunday, this gave the attendants enough time to eat through the candy end open up the gate to FREEDOM! This also gives the hive time to smell her and get used to her being in there with them and thus, accept her. Everyone wants to be accepted, right? In this case, the survival of the colony and her own survival could very well depend on her acceptance. The entrance reducer makes it easier for the colony to defend the hive since it is a brand new colony with no babies growing just yet. It takes 21 days for a worker bee to emerge, so, even if the queen was set free that night, there are still no new bees. They are busy busy bees drawing out comb for her royal highness to lay eggs in. Unless there is comb to lay in, there is no laying! I feed the sugar-water to make sure they have food to help them draw out comb and to also feed babies once the queen has started laying. I will feed until they don’t take it. As of Sunday when I checked, the bees were doing their thing and drawing out comb and the queen had been released. First hurdle is…..jumped!
Now the Nuc! Or Nucleus colony. With a nuc, you get 4 or 5 frames that come from an established colony and there is brood (babies!) and comb already on the frames, so you are not starting from scratch like with a package. I also got a marked queen so that I can spot her. Yes, she technically looks nothing like a worker or a drone, but with so many bees, she is not that easy to spot! So both my queens have a nice big blue dot on them. Since I was in my final 8 hours of bee class, the Hubs went to get the nuc for me from Smoky Ridge Apiaries. He had to get there before 9:00 a.m. to pick them up and unlike the package, the nuc has an open entrance. They had been smoking the bees, putting some on them, not rolling them in paper and smoking them, silly! They had been putting smoke on the nuc for a while, so they were very calm and hardly any flew out. He brought them home and set the nuc in front of the hive for the day and went about his business/chores. I installed them that evening about 6:00 p.m. with the Hubs as my photographer. I removed 5 frames from the hive, but this time I would not be replacing them as the frames from the nuc box are used in the hive (so now I have 5 extra frames which is nice). I opened up the box and noticed the smoke had worn off a bit so they were a little agitated. I sprayed them with the sugar-water to calm them and distract them and then proceeded to put each frame in while looking for the queen. I found her on the third frame which was in the middle. I put the frames in the same way they were in the nuc box, but put a couple of the new frames in between to give them a little nudge to work on the new frames. I am using plastic foundation frames, but you can use wax foundation, no foundation or any mixture. I put an entrance feeder on this hive as well to give them a head start, but did not put an entrance reducer since they are already more established than the package hive and can more easily defend their hive. Once the frames are in, I put on the inner cover and outer cover and the second colony is in! Second hurdle…jumped!
I have been filling their quart jars just about everyday to every day and a half. Once the nectar flow gets going, they should stop taking the sugar-water and do their thing without it. I have been seeing bees coming in with pollen on both hives, so that is a great sign. I initially thought my package hive was going to be the calm one, but they seem to be more defensive, which is probably because they feel they need to be since there are fewer bees and the girls are working so hard to draw the comb out for their sisters. Have not used smoke yet, but I will have it with me when I open the hives this weekend to check on them. I have left them alone except for refilling the jars since last Sunday. When I fill the jars I take a few moments at each hive to just watch them. It is amazing and fascinating and so cool to see them come in with pollen in their baskets and just their comings and goings.
I wear the jacket and gloves every time along with boots and long pants. One day, I may get to where I don’t wear gloves, but I doubt it. I had gone to my mentors house the week before getting my bees to watch him install his nucs and boy am I glad I did! Just being around the bees that were constantly buzzing around my head was a great introduction and made my experience easier since I wasn’t freaking out about so many buzzing around my head!
It is pretty darn interesting learning how bees work. The queen is a busy girl laying eggs. My queen is already mated, so she has all the sperm she will need for her lifetime of laying. Queens usually don’t lay well past 2 years, so it is recommended that you re-queen your colony every two years or so. Meaning, you got to kill the old one and bring in a new one. You can accomplish that by buying a new queen and installing her or have the workers make a new queen. If the workers make a new queen, she will have to go on one or two mating flights. That is where the drones come in. Even if you have a mated queen, she will still lay some drone eggs because this is natural and it helps to keep the diversity of the species. Even if she doesn’t need them, she knows some queen out in the wild does. Drones come from unfertilized eggs and have no stinger. So, the question of “who’s your daddy?” really means nothing to them since they don’t have one. Now, if your queen is mated, then the drones get together with a bunch of their buddies and go out on their own mating flights and hope to score with a different queen. A queen will mate with 10-15 drones to get what she needs. Once the drone mates, he dies. If he wasn’t lucky enough to score, he comes back to the hive to do, well, nothing but eat. He really has no function in the hive. That’s why when food is getting low, they get kicked to the curb. The workers on the other hand are crazy busy girls! They do everything! They clean, feed, defend, forage. You name it, they do it. They could even lay eggs (which is not a good thing). They have very limited laying abilities, but could do it. They can also make new queens. If for some reason they think the current queen is weak, sick or is dead, they will make a new queen, or several. It is a process that also is a sign of possible swarming, where half the hive leaves with a new queen because it’s too crowded and they just don’t think the current queen is up to snuff. Swarming generally will happen in the Spring.
Nectar and pollen are fed to the growing bees (which are actually in different stages of development of larva, pupae, bee). Also, the bees break down the complex sugars from nectar and pollen into simple sugars found in…..HONEY!!! You want a strong hive going into winter so that they have a lot of bees to cluster around the brood that is growing to keep it warm and to have enough food to feed everyone through winter. It can be a delicate process since you don’t want to take too much honey from them during the year so they don’t have enough food for themselves to eat to make it through winter. Not to mention all the diseases and pests that threaten them too! But, alas, I am getting ahead of myself. More on that later! I will update throughout the season to let you know how the ladies are doing! Here are a couple of cool shots that show the girls with pollen in their baskets on their legs (the orange and yellow stuff):
Remember, don’t worry, BEE HAPPY!