Day 1: Bringing Home the First Bees

Zaga in our class

As I just started with the bees, I think it's a good idea to document what I do, what they do, what's going on around them in the garden, and anything else I can think of that might give me insight into how to better manage them. No, that's the wrong word. I'm not a bee manager, I am a bee steward. I'm like a room steward on a cruise: I'm there to make sure the guests (bees) have everything they need to make them happy and comfortable. So here's how the first two days have gone.

Day 1: Zaga (my good friend and neighbor) and I took a brief class (two hours) on handling bees at Bee Weaver Apiary. We examined hives by pulling the frames from them, checking to see how much brood there was, how much pollen, how much nectar/honey, and we looked for the queen. If we found her, great. If we didn't, we looked for newly laid eggs that also tell us the queen is there. New eggs means the hive is queenright (has a queen), or was within the last couple of days. There are things you do if you think you've lost your queen, but I'll save writing about them until I do (as I know I eventually will). My main discovery during the egg-hunting process was determining that I am going to need reading glasses to do it.

Our instructor in just a veil

Our instructor Lauren (who wore far less gear than we did) also put together two fresh nucs (nucleus hives) of bees for us to bring home as one of the two I had pre-ordered was sold to someone else on Saturday and they were going to give me one with a queen already established in it and one that had just been combined into a nuc with a new queen. Because I wanted to put the nucs into two different types of hives and do a comparison with them, I wanted comparable nucs. So I kept the original older nuc, and added two more fresh identical ones. I also bought a package.

Me after ditching my gloves

Nucs have four frames made up of brood, pollen, and nectar. They also (usually) have an established queen. When you put a nuc into a new hive, you take out five of the frames in your hive and replace them with the four frames in the nuc and also a feeder that takes up one frame. The feeder is filled with sugar water that helps them with food until they get established in the new hive. Packages are a bit more wild and wooly. A package is a small wire box full of bees--three pounds of bees in my case (though I have no idea how they weigh them)--and a little matchbox thingie called a queen cage with a queen bee and maybe some of her attendants in it. The bees don't have any frames of brood or food. They also don't know the queen from Adam which is why she's in the cage: If you just threw her in the hive with them, they might kill her as a stranger. Because she's in the queen cage which has mesh sides, she releases her pheromones into the hive and it's passed along by the all the workers so that by the time she eats her way out of the queen cage or the workers eat their way in to her (there's a candy plug on the bottom) the other bees know and accept her.

Picking frames for the nucs

As you can guess, life is much harder on a new hive that comes from a package than it is on a new hive from a nuc. Even though two of my three nucs had new queens so the workers had to go through getting to know her and watching her gnaw her way out of the queen cage, they still started out with lots and lots of baby bees in different stages of development (brood) laid by some other queen (doesn't matter) and a bunch of frames full of food in both pollen and nectar form. When you install a package, you put the feeder in the hive just like with the nuc, but then you just shake the bees out of the package box into the new hive and let them fend for themselves. They have to get to know the queen (who can't lay any eggs until she's gnawed her way out the queen cage in a couple of days),. They have to draw out comb (build the wax on the foundation frame which just has the base of the cells or build the entire cells on a foundation-less frame made up of just a bar) where she will lay her eggs and also where the workers will put the pollen and nectar they gather. I haven't read or heard this anywhere, but logic tells me it's much more stressful for the bees and there is a probably a higher mortality rate in new hives from packages than there is for hives from nucs.

So we had our class, we put together a couple of really fat nucs, added a couple of queens, did a little more shopping, and headed home with the three nucs and the package in the back of the minivan. Something wasn't sealed well enough, but I'll get to that later. Of course, in order to accommodate all the bees we bought, I had to buy another physical hive. It wasn't a hardship at all as they had a new type that I hadn't seen: a hybrid between a a Langstroth and a Top Bar. The brood box (where the bees keep their brood, pollen and honey) on one side is based on a Langstroth, and then the super (where the extra honey goes) on the other side is based on a TopBar. The Langstroth side has foundation frames where the bees will put their brood, pollen and nectar. The TopBar side has foundation-less frames where the bees will draw out their comb and store extra honey. There is a panel in between the two sides that has holes too small for the queen to get through (called a queen excluder) so she won't go into the TopBar part and lay any brood, but the workers can get through (mostly) fine to lay up the honey stores. Zaga also bought a traditional Langstroth set-up from them in pretty shades of green and yellow.

Bees in a car!

So the ride home... Bee Weaver is down in Navasota, just over two hours from Austin. We loaded up the three nucs in the way back and put the package behind my seat. As we started down the road I started noticing bees on the inside of the way back window. I wasn't too worried as I knew there had been some loose bees on the boxes than might have ended up in the car. But as we went on, there were more and more bees. After about five minutes we pulled over and opened the hatchback to let a group of them free. But within ten minutes of starting up again, there was a plethora of bees bustling around the window and obviously communication with each other about what was going one. I don't think all the loose bees were from only one nuc as there was also quite a bit of fighting (to the death) going on on the window. While we did stop once more for a a hatchback-raising car cleanse, I wanted to save as many of the bees as I could (we started with around 40,000 in the car), so we on the rest of the way with just an occasional driver's side window-roll-down to keep concerned bees from stinging me while I drove.

We got home about 5:30 and immediately set about installing the package and the older nuc. On Lauren's recommendation, we held off on installing the two newly combined nucs till the morning of Day 2. Installation was both exciting and relaxing at the same time. Working with bees has its own zen and moving slowly and calmly, for me at least, is the natural state. I mixed the sugar syrup, donned a full beekeeper suit, assembled my tools (hive tool, smoker, bee brush, and electric match), lit the smoker, and Zaga (also all suited up) and I headed out into the yard. The package was the first to go in and we put it in the white Langstroth hive that I won in the auction at the Texas Beekeeper's meeting in December. The hive is situated at the back of the staggered row of bee hives, second from the left when you are looking at them from the garden side. I took the supers off and left only the deep brood box.



At first I tried to shake all the bees out of the package into the hive, but there were so many left in the package that I decided to try the other Bee Weaver recommended way which is to take four frames out of the box and put the package box into with the feeder removed and the big round opening on the top so the bees could get out. Before I put the package in, Zaga filled up the division board feeder with the sugar syrup, and I put it in the hive with space for the package box right next to it. Then I removed the cork from the bottom of the queen cage (the side with the candy) and hung it between the package box and the first empty foundation frame in the hive.



The second hive to be loaded was supposed to be my other Langstroth, but when I went to put the full division board feeder into the bottom box, it wasn't deep enough. That was when I realized that I had purchased three shallow boxes--one for brood and two for supers). Very fortunately, Zaga had purchased a standard Langstroth configuration (one deep box, one shallow), and I was able to borrow the cute little green deep (and the yellow bottom board that went with it) from her hive, put it on my first stand (the leftmost when viewing from the front) and put the well-queened nuc into it. I bought marked, clipped queens for all my hives, and this year's marking color is yellow so it was very easy to find the queen when I put the frames from the nuc in and to see that she was well and moving around.

With no more fuss, no drama (and no stings!) the first two hives were in.