Bees!!! Leave Post #1

Well this will be first of a series of posts about what happened the last couple weeks while I was on leave!

Part 1

I am sorry this update has taken so long, a lot has happened since the last update.  About the 19^th or so I got back to Mn from DC with a Uhaul full of stuff that was in storage in DC, it was about ½ of what we had in storage, a 15-foot truck full.  I was able to convince the movers who was unloading it in DC just to put it into the uhaul rather than unpacking it in the house and making me repack it.  Truthfully, I probably would have only fit about 2/3s of what they did in there!

The first day or two back was mostly unpacking the trucks before Saturday when the bees finally arrived.  I think we made about every mistake possible unpacking those bees plus we had the bad luck of one queen dying in transit.  At the end of the day we ended up with one small have rather than 2 stronger ones.  Right after hiving them we ended up with a pretty strong nasty spring cold front, think that may have actually helped us as it keep the bees inside to learn were home was.

Lexi, getting ready to hive out bees!

Ok for those who are looking at starting bees I will go through some of our lessons learned.  Number one, order enough bees, we ordered 2 three pound packages with queens because we waited too long to order as we were not sure of our arrival date.  We should have ordered 2X three pound packages with queens and one without to give us 2 hives with almost 5 pounds of bees each.  Also make sure all of your equipment arrives on time!  I ordered a second bee suit for myself and ordered one for Lexi, hers arrived mine did not.  I would give it a shot without the jacket but not without the vial! I did manage to get stung in the face anyway....

The next mistake was not making sure both queens were alive before we started to hive out bees.  We took the first back of bees and did not do a very good job of getting them all into the box, we probably only got about ½ of them in there, we then placed the queen and closed the hive up per the instructions on the video, we kind of figured the other bees would just find their way in. Did not happen that way, more on that later.  Well then, we get to the second hive we open up the box take the queen box out and slip it into our pockets to keep warm and proceed to hive the send batch of bees, we did much better on this box, we were not nearly as gentle shaking them out!  So we start to set up the hive I pull out the queen box to see, no live queen, only a shell…..

So, at that point we are one hive with a much too small batch of bees with a queen and another hive with a decent number of bees but no queens.  It was Saturday and this batch of bees had already taken 4 days to get to us.  If I had known how the weather would turn I would have probably ordered a new queen, with the cold weather it would have keep the bees inside until she arrived.  Instead, and I do not have any idea of this was the right or wrong move, if anyone out there has experience please let me know, we took the queen out of hive one and placed her in her box in hive two, we placed feeders on both hives and closed them up to let them settle one and hopefully let the bees who had not made it in get there. The next morning, we found the bees who had not been poured into the hives properly back in their shipping boxes, mostly dead from the colder weather.  (Yes, I know I am a terrible person and I do feel bad about it.)  If I had checked the queens first we would have just hived them all together from the start.

After two or three days, however both feeders were being used, granted the feeder on the second have much faster than the first one, after about a week the feeder on the first hive stopped being used and there was not much sign of bees a couple of dead ones on the floor so I am hoping they made their way over.  After three days, I did crack open the top of the hives to see honey comb being built in it and that the queen had escaped her box, and each day we do see quite a bit of activity coming out of that hive when the weather is warm enough.  They have been going through a box feeder about every two days for the first couple of weeks and from what I saw that was to be expected for a decent hive so I do have some hope we will get that one strong enough to survive the winter. We started the hives with 2 boxed and I read I probably should have added a third one at about 3 weeks however that third box will have to wait until about 6 weeks.  I will let you know how it looks at that point!

Well that is the end of part one!