First day with the bees

Unfortunately my bees arrived while I was out Storm Chasing and so Melissa and the girls had to go pick them up for me.  Chris Saad of Honey Trails was gracious enough to not only let me place my hive on his property (hopefully temporarily) but also to hive my bees for me.  I really wanted to have that experience myself, but I’m sure the future holds many more.

Yesterday the entire family piled into our van and went over to the hive at Honey Trails and got our first hands on experience. As my first experience working with bees I was extremely surprised at how docile the bees actually were.  To be honest, I was a bit apprehensive.  I’m sure I didn’t do everything correctly, but the bees seemed to simply ignore me and go about their business.

I’ve chosen to use a 5 medium super hive system instead of the traditional 3 large and 2 medium system on the advice of Eric at GardenFork.tv.  Given I didn’t know when the bees would arrive and when I would get to them and thus if they would run out of room, I had Chris hive them into 2 medium supers…just in case.   When I opened the hive the majority of the bees were clustered in the middle 3 frames of the top super and were building comb.  I decided to flip the hive to see if I can get the bees to build in the lower hive body first.  I have no idea if that was the right move or not. Talking to Chris after the fact, he didn’t know either.  Chris and I figure they were clustering nearest the hive top feeder, makes sense. My first experiment!

After 4 days the bees had taken in 1 gallon of sugar syrup so I added 1 gallon and topped off the hive top feeder (2 gallon capacity).  I also added a pollen patty.  Next trip to the hive I’ll probably need another gallon and I’ll be looking for eggs to make sure the queen is off to a good start.