The Entrance of the Bees Into Valhalla

We Bee People had a great hive starting day Saturday. The weather smiled gently on us with a little sun and nice temperatures. After some breakfast and socializing, we set about our day's work: installing bees into nine new hives!

Most of the new empty hive boxes had already been setup the day before and were ready for bees which come in small screen-sided shipping containers. We got 3lbs of bees for each of our new hives, about 10,000 bees per hive. We split our new hives pretty evenly between Carniolans and Italians, the two most common breeds in the United States today.

Inside each container, a smaller cage suspended from a metal strap holds the queen!

After dowsing the bees with a 1:1 spray of sugar water to calm them, the first step is to get the queen into the hive.

When we pull the small queen cage from the larger shipping container, a clump of bees usually hangs on as you see here in Erik's hands.

Notice that Erik isn't wearing any protective gear. When bees have no hive to protect, they're very docile and can be handled easily. Over the course of the day, even working without gear most of the time, we only received three stings...and those occurred largely due to our own clumsiness.

Erik then shakes the clump of bees surrounding the queen into the hive so that we can work on the queen next. The open shipping container is sitting next to Erik with bees beginning to mill about. Because it was a little cool Saturday (about 50 degrees F), the bees are a big sluggish. As the day warmed up, they became more active with successive hive installations. Sugar water helps keep them busy eating rather than flying around.

During shipping, the queen is kept separate from the workers for a couple of reasons. First, she's not from the same colony, so a good chance exists that if mixed too abruptly with the workers, they'd kill her. The second reason is that queens are expensive and easily lost if mixed in with thousands of workers. So, keeping her separate allows us to keep an eye on her and know that she's healthy.

Now we pull the small cork from the queen cage to replace it with a piece of soft candy, a gummy bear in this case. We take care to put a finger over the hole during the swap so that she doesn't escape!

Over a day or two, the workers are able to eat their way through the gummy bear to free the queen. In the time they take to do so, they also have an opportunity to get to know her and accept her as their own.

Once the gummy bear is in place, we hang the small queen cage inside the new hive with the screen side out so as to maximize contact between her and the rest of the bees.

Then we rather un-gently shake the bees out of their shipping container and into the new hive.  You have to rap the sides of the container pretty vigorously to knock them loose.  There's a little commotion, but no aggression.

In this picture, I'm wearing gear (first hive of the day...just seeing how everyone's feeling after riding around in a truck for several days!), but after a couple of hives we did everything pretty much without protection.

Once the bees are in, we use a soft brush to get stray ones off the hive top and then replace the 'quilt box' which is part of the Warre system we're using.  Then we put the roof on and we're done!