Saturday, April 17, 2010

To Bee or Not To Bee...

The bees are here! The bees are here! We were notified that our bees arrived at the ‘bee store’. When we got there to pick them up the place was buzzing (sorry I couldn’t resist) with activity. They had received multiple swarms as well as queens that morning and people were there getting supplies as well as their bees. We were told not to put our bees into their hive for 24 hours, as they had just been introduced to their queen and until they realized that this was their gal they might just leave the hive…The following day we donned our bee keeper gear and set about putting the bees into the hive. First we removed the syrup can from the box. This had been their food source in transit. Then we remove the queen in her little box, removed the cork that kept her there and replaced it with a marshmallow – seems that the bees eat away the marshmallow and release the queen – we then placed the queen box into the hive. Now came the exciting part putting all the bees into the hive. It was sort of like pouring thick bee syrup into the box. There are so many of them that they all clung together and looked almost viscous. Some flew around a bit but mostly they just went into the box. It was fascinating to see the different types of bees, the little workers and the great big drones all entering their new home. For the next couple days it was very quiet around the hive. I could hardly stand it, wanting to look into the hive to see what they were doing in there, but I resisted. Then out they came taking little test flights and establishing their flight path. So it looks like we did it! We actually have a functioning hive of bees! Next step, grow the size of the hive so they will make enough honey to share…

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