In case you hadn't noticed from our massive social media overflow of bee pictures OUR BEES ARE HERE! And I love the little ladies so much! And we worry over them more than you would imagine. I'll be sitting at work and see that it's raining and I'll think to myself "Oh I hope you girls got back inside before this started coming down!" They are so fascinating to watch and to learn about.
Everyone always asks where the heck we came up with the idea to get bees and to be honest I'm not even sure. All I remember is that about a year ago or more Brandon and his friend Alex started talking about how cool it would be and the next thing you know we have them!
We ordered our honeybees from
IFA early in the year (we ordered the Italian bees) and have been attending monthly beekeeping classes. The classes have been so cool, bees are seriously fascinating. For example, our teacher told us that they separate pollen from different flowers in different cells; he once took a toothpick and mixed all the pollen up in the cells and THEY WENT BACK THROUGH AND REARRANGED IT! Or how about that a queen bee can between 1,500-2,000 eggs per day! I've got fun facts about bees all day long people.
So the bees came the evening of Friday, April 22nd and we picked them up at IFA.Look at all the bees!
We went up to Alex's house first to install his bees and we had to work fast because we were losing daylight. The box came with 3 pounds of worker bees, some drones (male sex slaves,) and a queen that was kept in a separate small box. The whole container was closed with a tin can full of sugar water for them to eat on their trip.
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Here's the box, and as you can see there are some bees that somehow
escaped and are hanging out on the outside of the box. I thought it was
awesome that they didn't even attempt to fly away, they just wanted to
stay with their peeps. We carried the box around and stuck it in the car and they stayed there the whole time.
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| The first thing we did is set the box inside the hive that Brandon and Alex made. |
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| Then we took out the can feeder that had lots of bees at the bottom still eating. |
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| Then out came the Queen!! |
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The queen is kept separate for a couple of reasons. Firstly, so that the
company can essentially prove that they gave you a queen. Second,
because the queen and the worker bees were just transplanted together.
The workers were all in California working on pollinating the almonds,
and the queen came from Texas, or Arizona or something. Since the bees aren't initially loyal to
her, there is a risk of them killing her. So she gets her own little box with a small entrance covered in a sugary wax and a cork
to keep her safe . Pictured above is Alex's queen box.
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| Here's me pulling out our queen box |
We brushed all the bees off the queen box, removed the cork, and rubber banded her box to one of the bars that covers the top of the hive. Then we closed it up for the night with the hope that the bees would all crawl out of the box and eat the sugar coating on the queens box to let her out.
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| The next morning |
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Overnight quite a few of the bees came out and surrounded her but there were also lots left in the box. So we dumped the rest. It was pretty amazing because the minute we dumped the box the bees that fell out IMMEDIATELY turned and stared walking up to the queen. It was like a small stampede of bees.
Then we closed up the box and did our best not to bug them every day. We do check on them every now and again (weather permitting) and they already have a bunch of comb built up and some honey going. We're a little worried that we're not seeing much brood so let's all cross our fingers that they survive!
