The Bees Are Here!

April 3, 2009
Although it's the Sabbath and we normally refrain from work, the bees have arrived and we need to pick them up.

We picked the bees up about 45 minutes from the farm and so they had another jostling ride today after a very long ride yesterday from IL or somewhere way down yonder. We ordered 3 lbs of a new Minnesota variety in a nuc box and that's what we received. We brought the bees to the farm and followed the instructions in the book "Keeping Bees and Making Honey" by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum that our 8year old daughter had ordered from the library. It tells exactly and specifically what to expect and what to do, step-by-step! It was an excellent resource and greatly appreciated!!

I "suited up" in my plain white sweatshirt, bee hat and gloves and took my hive tool with me. I had grey sweatpants and white socks and shoes with my pants tucked into my socks. Hub turned off the electric fence and opened the two strands by their telltale yellow handles and hooked them onto the pole he conveniently placed for such a purpose. Then Hub and I went into the bee yard and set aside the hive cover and 10 frames on our extra pallet strategically placed for working with the hives. We set up the water bowl with a few twigs floating in it for a fresh water source nearby and placed the sugar water (1:1 sugar:water ratio) on the feeder. Then Hub handed me the nuc box and I slowly walked back down to the bee yard and placed the box on the hive bottom. The nuc box was too long for the bottom board of the hive so we just placed the hive right next to it on the pallet for easy transferring. Now for the nervewracking part. I gingerly began prying open the little cardboard door for the bees to become acquainted with their new home area. They were diving to get out! I spoke to them quietly telling them to hold on and finally got up the nerve to open the door so they could really get out. They came piling out! Pushing and shoving like little kids in line for ice cream! They even pushed some right up into the sugar feeder! I wasn't sure I had the door opened well but had also placed a clump of grass by it as suggested in the book to keep them from coming out too fast. I did wonder if they had a big enough opening but since there were many flying around, I didn't go back to recheck. I had quite a few sticking to me as I calmly (reminding myself to remain calm!) walked away. As I got close to the edge of the bee yard, they were all back to business. As of 2:24pm EDT, our Snowflake Farms honeybees are on site in our bee yard. Hubby went back later and redid the fence. So far so good!

As a side note, we also worked on getting the well pump running to water all those awesome strawberries but it wouldn't cooperate. So....guess who watered by hand again??