Wherein We Welcome a Cast of Thousands

My brother-in-law Jay opened up the trunk of his SUV and showed me our new family members: roughly 34,000 new family members. They hummed peacefully in their screened packages, mostly clustered around their food source (a large tin can of syrup) and their queen. I never thought 34,000 bees buzzing would sound peaceful or contented, but these girls seemed very calm. There were a handful of drones we noticed crawling around the edges, obviously larger than their sleek half-sisters. The drones looked like beer-guzzling couch potatoes to me. As I looked at these honeybees who were about to depend on me to help them thrive I suddenly felt like I did the morning I checked out from the hospital after delivering my first baby. As the nurse wheeled me down to the front entrance where Justin pulled up with our car, infant car seat strapped in, I remember thinking, "You're kidding!! You're sending this tiny baby home with me and I'M IN CHARGE NOW???" Yikes. I looked at those bees and realized my months of planning and studying had just turned into the Hands-On Final Exam. Here we go!

I had set up my hive bodies (or deeps, as they're called in our area) in a section of my backyard where I can watch them from my kitchen window. I had primed and painted all of the hive boxes white and set out the deeps on cinder blocks I purchased from Home Depot. After attending my beekeeper association chapter meeting the night before in which they reviewed "hiving our packages" (that's what it's called when you dump 17,000 bees from their package into a new hive) I made a step-by-step list of exactly what I had to do. As I left my brother-in-law I called home to Owen, my official assistant beekeeper, to begin assembling equipment so we could get the hiving done quickly.

The two 4-lb. hive packages full of bees came with a pair of wooden slats nailed to the tops to make them easy to carry. We started with the hive on the left, now named the Elizabeth Hive. Three of its frames are resting on the closer hive.

A closer picture of the hive packages. The round circles on the top are the tops of the syrup cans that hang from the top. The cans have tiny holes poked in the bottoms of the cans to allow the syrup to be sucked out by the bees. We really struggled to get the first syrup can out...I certainly didn't want to hug the package to my body to get a better grip on the can! It finally came out. PHEW.

The Elizabeth Hive interior. The middle frames are removed to install the queen in her cage and to dump the bees down inside. Those frames are gently replaced before closing up the hive. I took the syrup can and placed it directly on top of the frames, which is why I have an extra honey super over the top of the deep. The entrance feeder is all ready to go with syrup in it too. Extra feeding helps the bees get a head-start on drawing comb down the frames.

Here's our Italian hygienic queen bee named Victoria.

Carefully slipping the middle frames back into the Victoria Hive. We're almost done!

Once I dumped most of the bees out of the package down into the hive I rested the open package next to the hive for the remaining bees to come out on their own and join their sisters. Once the bees inside discover the queen is there they alert everyone else this is Home now and to come in. By the next morning both hive packages were empty.

Here's what I found upon checking my hive five days after installing the hive packages. Bees are very thrifty and will fill up any extra space with comb. The extra space was in the gap created by the queen cage being clipped over the edge of a frame. I didn't expect to see this, so I tried calling someone and then looking things up online to find out. The online information said to gently remove it because it would cause problems later on with trying to work the hives. One of these sheets broke off the frame while being covered in bees. I had to pick it up and brush off the bees over the open hive. The little box with comb drawn down from it is a queen cage. She comes in there rather than just being with the rest of the bees. This is for a couple of reasons. One reason is so you know your queen got into your hive safely. The other is that she is not from the same hive as the workers and so they need time to adjust to her scent. There is a candy plug at the bottom of that little cage the workers have to chew through in order to free the queen. By the time this happens everyone should be getting along happily.
I included my hand in the photo so you could see how big these sheets are. The darker spots on the largest sheet are pockets of pollen they've already collected. There were some cells filled with nectar too. I felt sorry taking these away. They represent a lot of hard work for my bees. But it had to be done. I adjusted the distance between the frames before closing up the hives to make sure there weren't unnecessary gaps in the middle.

It was exciting and a little scary opening my hives for the first time. I was by myself and trying to follow a checklist I took out with me. My smoker went out while working on the first hive, which was nerve-wracking. I found, though, by moving slowly (and I have to talk softly to them; I talk to everything) the bees stayed pretty calm. I got my smoker relit for opening the second hive and it worked well. It took me a really long time, though, to do this inspection... over an hour! I was late picking up my kids from school. They weren't too unhappy when they got to see the really cool-looking burr comb. Bronwyn and Liam both took it to school for showing their classmates the next day.