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.

Top Bar Day 5

Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Weather: partly cloudy with a slight breeze - mid 50's.

Well, my top bar hive (Schampel TBH) has been set up and with bees for 5 days now. The queen was still in her cage so it was time to release her. The hive is built with a screened bottom that has a sliding wooden bottom beneath that can open or close from the outside depending on how cold it is. I'm nervous about leaving the bottom wide open when it's still cold at night so it's been mostly closed all week. I've opened it a few times at night to shine my light up inside and see what's going on (ok - I've done it every night - sometimes twice). They've been very active all week as the weather has been nice. I've seen them coming back in with pollen also.

Upon first opening the hive this morning I was surprised to find that some of the top boards were stuck together. I figured the girls had propolized them together and didn't think much about it. But as I slowly pried them apart, it became obvious that the comb had crossed over more than 1 top bar.

I was able to pull out 3 different bars with comb built up (or down) about 5 inches wide and 6 inches long. I was amazed at the amount of comb already produced in only 5 days. Wow! They were filling the cells up with honey and pollen already too.

When I had built the top bars, I cut a groove down the center of each bar about 1/16 inch deep and filled it with bees wax to give the bees a starting point for drawing out their comb. At least that was the idea. Well, they had their own idea. They completely ignored the wax strips and used the edge of the top boards as a guide for starting their comb. This is going to be a problem as the comb is now attached to 2 top boards (actually centered between the 2). I ended up causing the collapse of one of the comb. I wasn't sure what to do with it so I removed it altogether.

In hopes to get them back on track, without destroying all of their hard work, I cut one of my top bars in half to use as a spacer. My top bars are 1 3/8 inches wide. I put the 2 bars with comb attached to one side of the hive and next to the 2 bars, placed the half bar. My thinking is that when the bees move over to build their next comb (if they use the same spacing), they'll end up drawing comb in the center of the next top bar. I'll let them proceed this way for a while and will eventually remove the 2 bars with misplaced comb. We'll see how it works.

The queen is in there and loose now, so I'll be getting back in next week to see if I can find any eggs or larvae and to check to see if they're drawing out their comb where I want it.

Here's a video I captured right be fore I closed her back up.

Here are a couple of videos taken before and after installing the bees.

The Package

Hive activity after the installation.

Hiving the Package Bees

Over the winter I build a Kenya Top Bar Hive. I became fascinated with the idea of "natural" beekeeping. I followed instructions found at The Barefoot Beekeeper

to build my hive. Most of the wood used in the building of this hive was from wooden pallets discarded at my work. I had ordered a 4lb package of bees with a Minnesota hygienic queen from Knight Family Honey about an hours drive from my house. I had a friend pick them up on Saturday as I was out of town. He dropped them off to me Sunday night and I was so tempted to hive them right then. However, the sun had just gone down and since it was my first time hiving a package, I wanted to take pictures. I decided to wait.

I kept the package overnight in the garage covered with a towel. They did fine. For Monday, I placed them on the back deck where they could get the sun in the afternoon while they waited for me. They were so anxious to get out and get working that they were actually trying to clean up the dead bees from the bottom of the package (though they had no way of carrying them out of the package).

The weather on Monday was perfect. It was still in the upper 70's at about 6:00 pm when I hived them. I had my helper keepers and we were ready to go. There was a slight breeze but not enough to bother the bees.

I had read about spraying them with sugar water but decided against it as I wanted a more dramatic hiving with bees flying around the yard. I had veils on my kids but did not bother wearing one.

The queen did not have the sugar plug that I was expecting so I'll have to get in the hive in a few days and release her. All in all it took about an hour. the queen was hung from the top bars and the box was dumped (as much as possible) directly in the top of the hive. I had only removed 4 of the top bars. Once the bees were dumped in, I replaced the top bars and placed the package on the table in front of the hive. At 7:30, when the sun went down, almost all of the bees had found there way home.

Some photos are posted here on this blog. The rest can be viewed here.

The girls inside the package - it's hard to believe there's 10,000 of them in there.

The queen in her cage.

My helpers in their veils (Tylor and Jaden)

Watching them all fly around.