I'm a beekeeper!

We got the call on Friday that the two packages of bees that I ordered were coming in at Hannibal, MO, at 9 p.m.  There was a fair crowd there and the bee delivery was an hour or so late.  But, I got my two packages of Italian bees and got home.   I installed the bees in their hives on Saturday.

Here's my set-up for my two hives.  There is a pond in the background so there as a convenient source of water.  I am using all medium supers instead of the traditional deeps for the brood boxes of the hive.

This is one of my packages of bees sitting on top of a hive waiting to be installed.  Very few dead bees in the box.  The queen is in her own separate small cage inside the clump of bees.  Her cage was easy to get to and out of the box but didn't have a candy plug in it.  I think this might have been mentioned at our school.  I was prepared for the possibility though with some miniature marshmallows to fill in the plug hole  The idea is to allow some time for the bees to adapt to the scent of the new queen while they eat the marshmallow out of the entry way.  I am supposed to wait five days before checking to see if the queen has been released, and I'm anxious to get back into the hive to see how things are going.

The bees are placed in the hive by just spraying them with sugar water and then just dumping them out of the box through the hole in the top of the box and into the hive.  I found that process doesn't make them very happy.  You can't get all of them out of the box and you can see a clump of them in the corner in the picture.  You are supposed to leave the box in front of the hive like this so that the rest of the bees can find their way into the hive.  When I came back the next day the package boxes were empty and I took them away.

Here are both hives after the installation.  There are two hive boxes here -- the bottom one has the foundation and frames for comb and holds the bees and the top box of the hive hides a hive-top feeder with sugar water.  There isn't much nectar available naturally yet and the bees have a lot of work to do to create honeycomb on the empty foundation of the hive so the queen can start laying eggs.  So, you are supposed to feed sugar water to the bees in the early stages.  The bees are kind of clumping on the landing board of the hives, especially on the far one.  I'm not sure why they were doing that.

I have added an entrance reducer here -- the unpainted strip of wood at the hive entrance.  This reduces the entrance to a small hole so that the bees can more easily defend the hive while their population is still small.  I had a little trouble with this because the reducer was a little too wide to fit into the space.  I had to take it back to the house and trim off a little to get it to fit.  I should have tried it for fit before I installed the bees, but it wasn't a big deal.  I have visited the hives several times since installing the packages on Saturday.  I added some more sugar water today to the feeders as they were somewhat low. I have noticed quite a bit of activity in front of the hives a few times -- a dozen or so bees hovering around.  I wondered if this was robbing activity -- other bees trying to get to the sugar water inside as there isn't much nature food available -- but decided it was probably just the home bees jockeying for position to get in and out of the small entry hole.  The activity wasn't frenzied as I would expect with robbing and not a lot of loud angry buzzing going on.  I didn't see any bees fighting at the entrance as they do when robbing is going on.  And the activity hasn't been consistent -- first one hive and then the other, and didn't see that kind of activity at all today.  There is quite a bit of coming and going though, so perhaps they are finding some nature sources of nectar to forage.

The Spring weather does now seem to have finally arrived and the plants seem to be trying to catch up after a late start to Spring.  These daffodils started blooming this week, two or three weeks later than usual.

These white daffodils are blooming along our backyard fence.

These fragrant hyacinths popped up quickly by our front step.

The leaf buds on the lilacs along the garden fence are bursting open and you can see that the grass is greening up quickly.  The buds on the apricot trees and plums are about to burst open too and I expect that they will be blooming this weekend.  I need to finish clearing off the garden plots from last year so that I can get them tilled up as soon as the ground dries up enough.  The prediction is for more rain through the rest of the week with some potential for severe storms, so it may be while before I can be tilling.   I should start hardening off my plants, though, in another week or so.