Honeybees Welcome

It's the beginning of bee season so I thought I would post about our little ladies. Our bees did really well all summer long last year which was really nice considering all the bee drama we had in the spring (a sterile queen, the uprising and murder of a new queen, decapitation of the sterile queen, the whole colony nearly dying until we combined it with another colony.) Even after all that they didn't survive the winter. Our hive, our friends two hives, our neighbors hive... none of them made it out alive. We're not really sure what they died from but it was really sad. So we went ahead and bought another package of bees this year and they're already off to an amazing start. The queen that came with this package is an all star and she is laying brood like crazy and we see all the foragers coming back home with tons of pollen. Good job ladies!

We picked them up on Friday April 21st and installed them into their hive that evening. Our neighbor was out of town when the bees came, so he asked Brandon if he could install his package of bees for him. My brother Timmy came to help but didn't have a bee suit yet and a bee flew into his ear and stung him. When bees sting it emits an alarm pheromone to alert the other bees basically saying, "hey ladies this is where the danger is! ATTACK!" So sure enough he got stung again on his forehead...twice. We are quickly learning that he just might be allergic to the little ladies because well...

Later that day

The next day

I half jokingly told him I was going to stick the baby monitor in his room that night to make sure he didn't stop breathing (we have an angel care monitor that has an alarm go off if your baby/adult brother stops moving.) But he survived and just looked like the guy from The Goonies for a couple of days. To be honest we had a hard time not laughing at him any time he was talking.

Fun fact: honeybees all have different jobs in the hive and one of those jobs is guard duty. The guards will sit there and watch everything you do, and if they feel like you are a danger or a threat they will start emitting that same alarm pheromone they send out when they sting. The alarm pheromone smells like bananas, so if you're around honey bees and you suddenly get a whiff of something that smells like banana flavored runts, it's time to grab your butt and run! That's why some bee keepers use smoke; a lot of people think it's to calm the bees down, but it's actually to cover up the alarm pheromone. In fact using a lot of smoke just kind of ticks them off and counteracts what you're trying to accomplish. The best thing to do if you're getting into the hive is to spritz the bees with sugar water. Then they're too busy licking all the delicious sugar water off themselves to worry about you. I mean think about it, would you rather have someone blowing smoke in your face or giving you a nice drink of kool-aid?

Last Thursday I got a call from a friend in my old ward (church congregation) saying that there was a swarm of bees in the neighborhood and she wondered if we could help. Considering a package of bees costs around $150 we were more than happy to come get them off their hands. Freebies...heh heh.

Bees start swarming this time of year because the colony has outgrown their hive and needs to split up. So the bees make a new queen, and the old queen and over half the worker bees fly off. Initially they don't go far, they'll find a tree branch to hang out on while scout bees go searching for a suitable place to make a new home. That's where these bees were, all clustered together in a ball hanging out in a tree.

 Brandon had to take a final that night and he couldn't go get them so he called up his friend Alex to catch them. Tim wasn't traumatized enough by his last bee encounter and he agreed to come along to assist, although I'm sure it helped that he had Brandon's bee suit to wear this time.

Once we arrived Alex and Timmy climbed up a couple of ladders, held a cardboard box under the ball of bees and shook the branch so most of the bees fell into the box. Then they took the cardboard box and dumped all the bees into an empty hive box. The motive here is really just to get the queen bee; if you get the queen the rest will all follow. Her royal highness hangs out in the middle of this ball of bees so as long as you get the bulk of them the queen should be in there.You know you got the queen if all the rest of the bees start going into the box too.

Sure enough all the bees started going into the box while a handful of bees stood outside the entrance and started sending out another pheromone that signals everyone still flying around to come to their new home. They send it out by sticking their butts in the air and fanning their wings, it's so fun to watch!

This is the only picture I thought to take that night...oops

Over the next hour or so we just let them do their thing and watched them re group inside their new home. There were some stragglers who kept heading back into the tree that we had to guide to the box, but for the most part all the bees figured out where the party was at. Once we had pretty much all of them in the box Alex drove them back to our house where they now sit next to our first hive.

The hive on the left is a top bar hive that Brandon and Alex built last year and the hive on the right is  a  langstroth hive. People always think our backyard must be covered in bees, but they really just hang out by the entrance of their hive. Although we do get some pollinating our weeds for us...thanks gals.

Here's a picture of a comb with lots of honey on it! The capped honey is all done and ready to eat while the rest is stuff they're still working on.

Well thanks for reading and letting me gab about my bee fascination! Let me know if you want to hear more about them or if you're thinking to yourself get back to the baby pictures already!!