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.