Installing the Bees.

April 16, 2007.
The bees arrived! I was told by the bee supply store that I could pick up my bees anytime so I went down there that same day.
The box of bees was a little bigger than a lunch box and was quite impressive. The box was filled with bees, but I was surprised by how quiet and peaceful they were. Instead of a buzzing box of activity it was just a quiet box with a "beard" of bees sitting inside.

It was a tense car ride home with thousands of bees riding shotgun, and then I installed them that evening.

Here are some photos and my experiences, I won't give detailed instructions as those can be found in various books or web pages, instead I'll focus on what I specifically learned.

The first surprise was that as soon as you open the box the previously quiet bees start buzzing and as soon as possible they run out of the box like a mini stampede. It was a little intense.

The first mistake I made was when I sprayed down the bees with sugar water before installing (to calm them down). I had my glove on so when I sprayed the backsplash went onto my glove so for the whole installation my left hand was a popular place for the bees to hang out. Here is a photo of the bee box right after I opened the box:

The second mistake I made was when I removed the queen cage from the box. I tried to be very careful but I was a little clumsy (thanks to the gloves) so I ended up dropping the cage into the box. I would highly recommend a pair of pliers next time.

Here are a couple of photos of me trying to get the cage out of the box:

Reaching into the box just resulted in a glove covered with angry bees (once again some pliers or tongs would have been nice).

I ended up having to dump the box over and shake out the queen cage:



With the queen cage finally in hand I proceeded to put the cage in the hive. I knew that you need to hang her so that the other bees can get to the screened part of the cage to feed her. I had to fiddle with it a little to get her in their properly. Next time I would definitely ask at the bee supply store for an example cage so that you know what you're dealing with. Once I saw the cage I realized I could have hung the cage easily by having a bit of wire handy, but since I didn't know that ahead of time I had to sort of hack it together.

The other surprise was that I had read that the cage hole would be blocked with a bit of bee candy. Not sure if it was a mistake or if there was some other reason but there was no candy in my cage. I pulled the cork out and the queen made a break for it. Luckily I had read that if the candy falls out you can use a mini marshmallow, and luckily we had some on hand so I sent my wife to fetch one for me while I kept the cage hold plugged with my finger. Definitely ask your bee supplier details about the queen cage to avoid these hassles.

Here is the picture of me putting the queen cage between the frames:





Once the queen was in it was just a matter of shaking the bees into the hive. This actually worked pretty well, though you ended up with a lot of flying buzzing bees. Again, pretty intense.

The only additional things that I learned was I left the bee box outside the hive entrance figuring that any straggler bees would move into the hive eventually. Instead the next day I saw a small clumb of bees in the package box clumped where the queen cage used to be. A quick posting to the Bee Source Exchange told me that the bees were probably sensing the residual phermones from the queen and were getting confused. One person suggested that when you shake the bees out into the hive to really do a thorough job of it and to then move the box far away so that the bees can't get to it. I just took the box the next day and shook the rest of the bees out into the hive and then took the package box away and it seemed to work fine.

At that point it was just a matter of feeding and waiting.