New packages

Installed 2 packages yesterday. Purchased both from Knight Family Honey in Lehi, UT. Both were 3 lb packages with Carniolan queens. Installs both went smooth. Had my little helper with me.

Notice the bees on the queen cage and he's still not afraid (way cool).

The first package went into a new TBH in the back yard of our current rental. I had hung the queen cage (with candy plug) directly beneath the 2nd top bar on the left and I had arranged the follower boards to allow them 9 bars. The bars were fitted with guides made from strips of wood secured into the kerfs on the bars. The strips were then rubbed with bees wax. The follower on the right side has a 3/4 hole in it allowing the bees to move through to a feeder area where I placed the remaining sugar water that came with the package.

A queen excluder (includer) was placed over the open entrance. I've read about a lot of packages absconding and wanted to prevent this. The includer will be removed once I see that she is laying.

The other package was installed into a hive I will attempt to manage somewhat like an Oscar Perone.

It has 2 deep boxes with bottomless frames only in the top box (these frames happen to be old drawn out comb - she should be able to start immediately laying eggs upon release from the cage). This allows for a more natural and huge brood nest. The next deep box will be for honey storage for the  bees only. These 3 boxes are never to be messed with (Oscar uses 4  boxes). The boxes above these three will contain frames for honey that I will harvest. We'll see how it goes.

I set the queen cage (with sugar plug) directly on top of the frames in the 2nd box (top box is currently empty) and dumped the remaining bees in. I set the can of sugar water also on the frames where they can get to it.  Also used a queen includer on this hive. Afterwards I thought it might have been best to hang the queen from the bottom of the frames in the middle box. Also closed the entrance on the hive base and drilled 5 3/4" holes in the center of the bottom box. I'm starting to think that not having a bottom entrance might have an affect on mites. The reason that I say this is because out of the 3 langstroth hives that we had managed, only the colony that refused to use the bottom entrance survived the 2nd year.