The Bees Have Arrived!

Courtney at Bee Well picking up our bees!

As beginners, we opted to purchase two packages of Italian bees. Italian bees are said to be a great "starter" bee since they are generally gentle and known to be good producers. There are many other varieties of bees in North America including Carniolan, Russian, Cordovan, and Buckfast (just to name a few!) (Note: if we had gotten our orders in earlier, I think I would have purchased nucleus hives versus the packages since a nucleus hive already has drawn wax and typically strengthens faster but we didn't know that at the time...we're learning!)


Once we picked up our bees and got them home, our bee mentor came over to help us with our first installation (reason #482 to find a bee mentor!) Typically, an installation really wouldn't take very long, but our mentor went step by step with us explaining the hows and whys of what we were doing during each step of the process and I believe that really helped me and Courtney to feel more confident about what we were doing and will help us with future installations!



         

                            Courtney pried the protective cover from the package and then placed the lid back over the opening.

 



Then Courtney removed the can of sugar syrup from the package and then quickly placed the lid back onto the opening!

 

The Queen was in a small cage inside the package. We had to carefully remove the cage (it has a small strap attached to it that was stapled to the package box.) You can see our bee mentor holding the queen cage and educating Courtney on the reasons the Queen is kept in the cage.

 

Courtney and our bee mentor removed about half of the frames to make room for the bees.

 

 

Then Courtney secured the Queen inside the hive box with the candy end facing up (so that there wasn't a potential for one of the worker bees inside the cage to die and clog up the exit hole and trapping the queen.)

 

 

 

After spraying the bees with a few squirts of sugar syrup (we opted to NOT soak them as some websites suggested) we poured them in!

 

 

 

You can see in this picture why we needed to remove a few of the frames! (You can also see where we've secured the Queen.)

 

 

It only took a few minutes for the bees to locate the Queen-this was amazing to me!

 

 

 

In about 30 minutes or so the bees that had been flying around made their way to the hive and began going in to check on the Queen!

 

 

 

After that, we placed the lid back on and left them alone for a week!

(And then repeated the whole process for the second package :)