Bees!

We finally got our bees! We put in an order for two starter colonies (called "Nucs" short for nucleus hives) from a place about two hours away from us. I was trying to figure out how we were going to get our schedules to work out so that we could go and pick them up, when Anthony texted me and said that he found a place locally we could buy bees from! One of his patients happened to mention that he got stung by one of his bees. Come to find out, he has 49 beehives and was ready to sell us two nucs that weekend! It was sooo much nicer to only have to drive 20 minutes to pick them up. They came out and loaded them in the truck and then Anthony strapped them down. We were coming directly from the boys' soccer game and we promised them smoothies on the way home, so we had these in the back while we went through the drive through. It was pretty funny!

After letting them settle overnight, the next morning it was time to transfer them from the box to their new home in our bee hives. We decided to put the hives inside the fence with Seabiscuit, since we are hiring someone to clear out the other parts of the yard later in May.

James was really excited about testing out the smoker. It creates cool smoke that calms the bees when you are handling them.

The inside of the hive has wooden frames that fit inside that the bees use for laying eggs, and storing pollen and honey. So transferring the bees starts with taking the frames out of the box they came in and placing them into where we want them to be. Each frame has an exact amount of space in between them called "bee space" which is exactly what they need to be able to communicate with each other effectively. Bees are amazing!

Here is a video of moving them. They are really calm, as long as you move slowly and calmly, they don't get upset and mostly are just curious about you. They will crawl over you and fly around you but in the three weeks we've had them not a single one of us has gotten stung. Sometimes we go over there and look in the hive without any kind of bee gear on and it doesn't seem to make a difference! Different varieties of bees have different temperaments and ours just seem to be very docile.

All done!

We put some branches in front of the entrances to both hives because when the bees come out and see it, they will be a little confused and it will make them take an orientation flight around the hive to see what is going on and help them recognize their new home.

We've opened up the hives and checked on them a few times, the first time a week later to find the queen in each colony. Then a week later we checked to see that the queen is laying eggs properly and to make sure there were no ants or mites or other pests bothering the hive. A few days ago we tried to collect a few bees to test them for mites and got to scrape off some honeycomb that they put on the outside of the frames (what James is holding in the jar). We are loving the beekeeper life!