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| Jessi Loerch (click to enlarge)
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| A honey bee explores my finger, in search of some sugar syrup. |
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Welcome home, honey bees, all 14,000 of you.
Posted
at
1:19 pm
I'm entranced. Entranced, fascinated and possibly a smidge obsessed with honey bees.
Laura and I made a whole bunch of new friends this week. About 14,000 of them.
Installing bees in a hive was a bit intimidating as newbie beekeepers.
In the end, though, hiving the bees was incredibly fun and, surprisingly, not intimidating.
We ordered our bees from Beez Neez, and they showed up in Snohomish on Wednesday, all carefully packaged with a single queen.
This is what the package looked like. That's four pounds of bees, or about 14,000.
The box, not surprisingly, made a rather impressive buzzing noise, which quieted down once we supplied them with a spray of sugar water.
Before we could put the bees in their new hive, we had to get the queen ready. She comes in her own, small cage inside the main cage. She is kept separate to give the bees time to get used to her. Our first actual contact with the bees came when we pulled out the queen. That required some quick movement to avoid letting the rest of the bees escape. Once we had the queen's cage, we took out the small cork holding her in, and quickly replaced it with a small marshmallow. The marshmallow keeps her inside -- making sure she won't escape during the hiving and also giving the bees a few more days to get used to her. The bees will eat through the marshmallow to release her. (Slick, huh?)
The bee hive was ready to go, so we took our bees and our queen (now tucked warmly in Laura's pocket) out to the hive. We pulled out a few frames and then dumped the bees out of their cage into the hive.
Then we put the rest of the frames back in, carefully to avoid squishing any bees.
Finally, we gave the bees something to eat. Since there is not enough nectar flowing yet, and because it's a new hive that needs time to get established, we will feed them sugar water until there's enough nectar to keep them going.
With our work done, we settle down in the grass to watch our new pets.
And then we watched some more. And some more.
And yes, we did get stung. Once each. Both times were our own fault.
If all goes well, we'll have some honey to enjoy in the fall. In the meantime, I can't wait to get back out there and see the bees again.
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