In April, our bees arrived from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm. We ordered a 3-lb. package, which is approximately 10,000 to 12,000 bees. Talk about intimidating, but really interesting at the same time! The box of bees had this great smell of beeswax and honey, and the bees just had this soothing "hum" about them. I guess most people would say they buzz, but they hum to me :-)
We set up our beehive near the edge of the woods by our tractor shed. The first order of business was to get all suited up in coveralls, the veil, etc., and spray the bees with a sugar water solution. The sugar water makes it more difficult for the bees to fly, which makes it much easier for us to handle them. Getting the bees into the hive was pretty simple. We took out a few frames and literally dumped them in! After they were all in the super, we put the remaining frames in and closed the cover. We fed them sugar syrup for several weeks to help them gain strength and to tide them over until the nectar began flowing.
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| Troy all suited up, about to dump the box of bees into the super. |
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| Troy putting the top on the hive. |
We checked the sugar solution container every day or so and opened the hive about once a week for a while. The bees did really well and we had to put the next super on the hive about one month after we got them.
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| Honeybees at work, filling up a frame with brood and honey. |
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| If you look closely, you can see the brood (baby bees) in the cells surrounding the yellow-ish capped cells. They look like little white worms at this stage. |
We don't have any recent photos of the beehive, but it now has a total of 4 supers. The bees were doing really well when we checked on them last time. We'll begin feeding them sugar syrup again towards the end of the month, and around that time we'll also see if there's any honey for harvest. The bees will need about 40 lbs of honey to overwinter with, so we can't take it all from them. For a colony just established in April, they look great!
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