The Installation (Part 2)

With L's bees safely inside their new house it was time to give my bees the homecoming they undoubtedly wanted.  Same procedure: take off the wood panel on top then jar package violently while taking out can and keeping hold of queen cage tab.  Simple right?  Well this time I was in charge of the can and L was in charge of the queen.  Lo and behold she drops the queen.  Thankfully the tab was still attached for mine.  However, it was L to reach into the bee package and not me (scared of bees remember?).  Thankfully my fearless wife got the queen and very few bees got out of the package .. really only the ones clustered on the cage.  I failed to mention that earlier.  Tons of bees are clustered on the queen cage, so putting it in the hive without getting stung or squashing any is delicate business.  I brushed a good portion of the bees off the cage with our bee moving feather stick (that's a technical term) and got the cage all hung up.  I did have to remove the tab and stick it on the other way (L had to reattach hers anyway so she attached it the 'correct' way).  We wanted our queen to be released up and it was attached originally so she would be released down.  That way if her attandants die (a few bees in the cage with her) they won't block the exit!  After hanging up the cage I poured some bees onto the queen as instructed by our literature and dumped the rest in the space where we took a few frames out.  Here's a picture:

I had enough time to hang my queen (without half the bees being in the hive like they were for L) that I could get it so all ten frames fit back into the hive.  Yes!  I put the feeder on, filled it and we were finished.

That's actually L's hive with the feeder on, but I think you get the picture.  We actually took our bee packages apart some to get all the bees out (the packages aren't designed well for bee egress).  We left the vestiges of the packaging in front of the hive in case the couple bees left in them had a desire to come out and join their sisters.  We left the initial wood cover for the packages as a ramp for a few bees still on the ground.  It got pretty cold that night so any bees that didn't make it in were probably SOL.
As we were cleaning up and getting ready to go in we were brushing the last few bees hanging on our clothes off and as L moved one onto her finger to release her, she got stung.  Final installation sting total L:2, N:1.  After going inside we were looking each other over and realized we had lots of bee excrement on our clothes.  Gross, but understandable after being in a cage for almost a week.  They don't go to the bathroom in the hive, so they wait until they can take a 'cleansing flight'.  We took some pictures showing our slightly stained clothes, but it's so small you can't really see it in this tiny picture format.  Trust me though, the 'yellow rain' was there.  Anyway, our hives were now complete with bees (hopefully) releasing our queen inside.  Although more likely they were just trying to stay warm since it got down to about 40F that night.  Here's pictures of our completed hives:

L's is green, mine is a light purple.  Both are exquisite places to live if you're a bee.   That's it for now.  See you next post. 

The Installation (Part 1)

So it was the big day, April 6th.  It was perfect ... nothing good on TV ... no after work social sports team activity (see flightoftheconchords.co.nz).  As an aside to my aside I saw them (FOTC) with my brother in concert at Kent State University.  It was awesome.  Moving on, so really it was about 60F which was warm enough to put the bees in.  I took a half-day at work to prepare myself mentally (I am really scared of bees).  Everything was ready for when L got home.  All she had to do was move her actual hive parts outside.  So we go down to the basement where the bees were still quite happy (we fed them twice a day with 1:1 sugar syrup).  We each claim a package and bring them to our hive site.  Our hive site had been prepared earlier and consists of two cinder blocks in a small gravel pit.  The hives will sit on the cinder blocks.  Anyway we decide L will hive her bees first.  We're in our veils with long sleeves and long pants.  I have latex gloves on, L goes barehanded ... crazy.  I also put my socks above my pants, last thing I want is some bees crawling up my pants!  It was pretty sylish as you can imagine.  Laura is definately ready as seen in the picture below:

Not many dead bees in the packages, hooray!  Anyway the first thing you do is take the piece if wood off the top which is covering a can filled with sugar syrup which the bees eat.  We fed them more just to be nice (and cause the books said to).  Also sticking out is the tag attached to the queen cage.  Below is a picture of the queen cage after our first inspection ... it helps the installation story to make sense.

Anyway, you're supposed to start prying out the can, while holding onto the tag attached to the queen cage.  Then you slam the bees to the ground so they fall away from the top of the package.  It wouldn't make you happy either.  Anyway we got all that.  I think L was in charge of the can and I had to get the queen.  She gets the can wedged out and I pull on the queen tag to get the full cage.  Disaster!!!!  The tag (the white plastic stuff in the picture) came off completely and L's queen cage fell into the unhappy pile of bees in the package.  It turns out none of the books cover what to do in this instance.  We (eventually) decided to dump some of the bees into the hive (Where we had removed four frames as seen in the pic below).  This picture is actually of my installation, but it helps give an idea of what it looked like for L too.

So the queen cage falls into the hive space during her pour (violent shake) of about half the bees.  So she reaches into this buzzing, unhappy mess barehanded to retrieve her queen.  Sounds like a Chaucer tale!  We had a few pushpins outside because you need to tack the queen cage into the hive.  So we used some of these to attach the plastic strap back to the queen cage.  All the while there are some unhappy bees starting to fly around.  L got stung on the leg during this process and I was stung on the shoulder.  We soldier on however.  Finally L manages to get the queen cage strung up in the hive with the 'exit door' unblocked.  This is important because the workers have to release the queen by chewing through a taffy like substance which blocks this 'exit door' (basically just a hole, but that seems like undervaluing it).  Anyway she dumps the rest of the now restless bees into the hive and puts three of the four frames back in, but she can't fit the tenth frame.  This shouldn't be a problem though because some of our books say to only have 9 frames in there after installation.  She puts the feeder on top, fills it with sugar syrup and we're finished ... well actually half-way finished, I still had to install my bees.  I  think that'll be the next post.  I need a breather after reliving that.

More 'Free Bees' Than I Expected

I'm Nathaniel.  N for short.  Hi!  We'll start at the beginning.  You can't hear it, but there's 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC playing in the background while you read this.  It makes it more epic ... trust me.  I went to pick the bees up in the afternoon on April 4th.  They'd been delayed a week, but it had been cold anyway so maybe it was better this way.  Took maybe 40 minutes to drive to the designated pick up spot (some guy's house).  As I got close I'm thinking "I'll have to look closely at the mailboxes so I can spot the address".  Thankfully I could concentrate because I had turned the radio off.  As an aside ... why do we do that.  I listen to music at work 90% of the time, but I have to turn it off to look at mailboxes?  Maybe they'll do a RadioLab episode on it (http://www.radiolab.org/).  Anyway, as I turn a corner there is a huge box truck in a driveway with bees flying in and out.  I mean a LOT of bees.  Unfortunately these bees don't have anywhere to go because they aren't 'with a hive'.  I had a veil and my epi-pen in the car just in case.  But I decide I don't want to be 'that guy' so I leave the veil in the car and go to ask for my two boxes of bees.  It took a couple minutes as there were a few other people picking up their bees.  I stood perfectly still and tried to plaster a smile to my face.  Eventually it's my turn so I ask for my two boxes of bees and the kindly older fellow goes into the truck to get them.  He comes back with two good looking boxes of bees.  The bees seem happily clustered in the top 2/3 of the box.  There are a lot of bees on the outside of the package though.  Not what I was expecting.  I think ideally I would have had a kindly older fellow (this is where the similarities end) in a white tuxedo hand me two boxes of bees which greet me in a gentle buzz (basically professing their love for me already) with NO BEES ON THE OUTSIDE OF THE BOX.  Back to reality, the fellow asks if I want to see the queen.  'Sure' I say.  He then slams one of the boxes as hard as he can on the floor of the box truck.  The bees are not happy.  They buzz ... a lot.  It sounds uncannily like 'buzzzz we will remember this forever buzzzzz'.  But with a lot of pissed off bees in the bottom of the package I can see the queen in her cage.  He then shows me the other queen.  Super.  I gingerly ... trying very hard to avoid the 'free bees' still on the outside of the package ... pick up two boxes of bees to carry them to the car.  I set them down to call my wife (Laura [L for short {at least in this blog}]) to tell her that I have the ladies and will be departing shortly.  She tells me to make sure I text her when I get home so she knows something bad didn't happen.  That definately kept my confidence high.  Anyway I put the packages in a shallow plastic storage bin so they don't slide around and close the trunk.  Unfortunately when I say trunk I mean 'back of the SUV', so there is nothing but space between me and the ladies.  I roll the windows down partway in the back and set off for home.  Thankfully it's still warm 75F, so the windows down is okay.  I can see maybe 20 bees just sitting on the back window.  About halfway through the trip they sort of cluster towards the bottom of the back window.  One bee makes it up to the second row of seats, thankfully she stopped there.  After a very tense 45 minute ride home (I drove a bit slower with 20,000 bees in the car), I made it home.  I wonder what the people driving behind me thought?  Here's a picture of the ladies in their packaging box soon after I got home.

Here's a close up.

See the 'free bees' still hanging on?  It's crazy right?

Anyway, after I got them home I sprayed them with the 1:1 sugar to water mixture we had made the day before.  This was after I had opened the trunk and let the bess disperse who had decided to let go of the packaging.  Mind you no bees got out of the package, just some bees were on the outside of the packaging and they decided to investigate the back window as I said earlier.  So they're fed now, so I moved them into the nice cool (53F) garage when it decides to rain outside.  After L gets home we go down to the garage to look and they actually seem calm.  Not much buzzing, just a faint 'buzzz it's chilly in here buzzzz'.  We decide the garage is a bit too cold so we put them in the actual basement (at a balmy 58F).  There are still about a dozen or so 'free bees' on each package.  I assume they can't (hopefully won't) find their way upstairs.  Another aside here - so I call the bees 'the ladies' because they're mostly female.  Maybe I'll put some bee biology in another post since I just wet your whistle.  That's it for pickup day (Success!!) I think I'll put the actual installation in the next post.