Maybee Someday...I will be a beekeeper!
After weeks of prep work building a hive, and researching all that we could about bees, they finally arrived. Our bees traveled from New York to their new home in Missouri. I was like a kid on Christmas morning waiting in line at the Post Office for my bees, Grinning from ear to ear and probably making an obnoxious amount of little squeals ( which I did uncontrollably, I was not trying to be obnoxious). I nervously inspected my package of bees, and was slightly concerned that many of them were laying on the bottom and were likely dead after the 4 day journey. I sprayed them down with a 1:1 mixture of sugar and water, and within minutes many of the bees that had been on the bottom of the box were now moving around and showing signs of life. Wooohoo. Now that I knew my bees had survived the journey, it was time to get them into their hive.
For my first hive I decided to do a top bar hive, which my wonderful husband made for me without a pattern and for under $100, so I am pleased with how easily this hive can be created. I really enjoyed the simplicity of the design, and the fact that it really allowed for the bees to do what they do best, build beautiful combs and make honey. The bees do not need plastic frames of fake comb for them to work from, they know what they are doing, and so I will let them do just that. And by no means am I bashing beekeepers who use box hives or any other style hive, this is just what intrigued me the most. In fact, when we expand our bee population on the farm, we will likely go with a Langswith style hive to allow for greater honey production.
The hive is nestled into the corner of our opening for the garden and our sorghum cover crop area along the treeline, and about 100 yards away they have access to the pond. Seems like a pretty good place to be for a bee! We waited for the rain to clear up today, and then dumped the girls in around noon. We had good cloud cover so it wasn't too hot, and the wind was relatively low. My research suggested that a cool day with little wind is the best time to install a package, so we lucked out. We placed the queen 6 top bar frames deep and left them a total of 10 top bars wide to start (The queen cage came with 4 drones inside to help tend to the queen during transit. We pulled the cork on the bottom of the queen cage to expose the candy plug, and soon the girls will eat through that and release their queen, I hope) The remainder of the hive is blocked for now. Its a good idea to keep their initial living space somewhat small so they do not feel overwhelmed defending it. Once they become established and start producing comb, we will pull the divider and place a queen excluder and allow them full range of the hive, which is about 3 feet in total length,, with a total of 25 top bars.
The install took about 30 minutes total, including the time to get the hive leveled and smoker set up. Everything went smoothly. My dad was there to help with the install and to snap some pics, I am excited to have his help on this project. My dad can do and make anything, so he is just the right kinda guy to do projects with, plus he is pretty awesome just to be around, so win win. Now we just have to wait, make sure the feeder stays full and in three days we will check to make sure the queen has been released, and to make sure they have started to build comb.I am really excited to see where the beekeeping journey will take us. Maybee someday we will have some honey and beeswax goods to sell, or just have a kick ass garden from our amazing bees doing what they do best!!!Thank for reading. #savethebees #newbeekeeper #buildingalegacy #maybeesomeday
Sincerely,
Julia
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