Installing

Well, isn’t that nice? I don’t write a post for over a week because I’m busy being run over by the end-of-semester freight train, and then when I have a blissful free day, my internet is on the fritz. Ah well, I shall persevere! All the world must know how utterly adorable and delightful our bees are!

Heh.

So, as you know, we picked up our package bees last Tuesday, and they were fascinating and delightful and jiggly. Here are a couple of pictures, so that you can be awed at the sight of hundreds of cages, and, on a smaller scale, three pounds of bees. This hobby is so cool.

We were a bit surprised to find neighbor bees on the package on our back porch, because it’s news to us that there should be any bees around here. Admittedly, where we live is a bit “greener” than a lot of places around here, and there are trees and grassy spaces and whatnot, but it’s mostly all apartments and townhouses, and we weren’t aware of any beekeepers in the area. Anyway, that was cool, but a couple of them have evidently decided that our porch is the place to be, as I saw one of them out there just a couple of minutes ago. I feel sorry for the little lady, wasting her time in such a barren, lonely spot. We don’t even have any plants out there, because it gets no sun.


Anyway…our teachers had advised us to let the bees rest and get used to each other for a few days—around four—but as usual, we came to our own conclusions about that. Mostly, we have limited access to our site, and on Saturday, which would otherwise have been the obvious install day, we knew that the gardens were going to be swarming with people for the annual plant sale. Swarms of bees and swarms of bystanders don’t go together all that well, ya know, not to mention that parking would have been heinous. So we decided to install on Wednesday.

When Jacob picked me up Wednesday afternoon after classes, I was so exhausted that I thought I might pass right the heck out. We went home to collect our stuff and mix up the feeder syrup, and I was just barely above useless, drooping all over the house. Mostly because of me, we didn’t get out of the house with all our gear until a little after four (the gardens close at 5, and they’re half an hour away, recall). Then, tada!—Northern Virginia happened, and we sat in traffic. I crumpled over sideways onto the big metal box between our seats, and fell asleep, despite massive discomfort.

So we arrived at the gardens just at 5, me with my left arm asleep and corduroy imprints in my forehead, Jacob hot and exasperated. Not a fortuitous start, eh?

But almost immediately the peace and sunshine began seeping through our sulk. The few people still around the gardens seemed to think that it’d be fine if we took care of business and left whenever we were done—they were going to be there late getting ready for the plant sale anyway. So we trekked everything down to the hives, posed for a couple of pictures with a box of bees for one of the garden employees, and started getting ourselves organized. The bees were decidedly ornery, so we gave them a good soaking with dilute sugar water in a spray bottle, and they calmed right down.

First off, we stole a couple of frames of honey and pollen from the strong hive, because they had some “to spare” and we thought it’d be a nice boost for the new colonies. Then, we arranged a couple of boxes with combinations of these filled frames, drawn comb bought from Michael, and foundation, in a way that seemed best to us at the time, whether it was or not. I sprayed down all of the frames with sugar water to make them more appealing to the bees, and we withheld four frames from each box to give the bees somewhere to go quickly when we put them in. By this point in time, I was feeling significantly more energetic. Once we had the first box all set up to our satisfaction, we pulled the top off the shipping cage, hammered down the ends of the staples for safety’s sake, and pulled out the queen cage by its little round shipping tab. And tada!—there was the queen, the ultimate “fat bottomed girl”—I kept humming the song to myself after that. She has a little paint dot on her back—I think it’s turquoise-ish, I forget—to make her easier to find on the frames. Her abdomen is much larger than that of the defective one we removed the other day, it’s obvious. Since we hadn’t really brought the necessary equipment to suspend the queen cage between the frames, we laid her on top of the frames in the requisite position and orientation and stapled the box down with a bit of ribbon (it’s supposed to be hardware cloth, but we don’t have any yet, and Jacob read somewhere that you can use ribbon too). Then we knocked the bees to the bottom of the cage and opened up the cage again, and pulled out the feeder-can. We’d expected it to be pretty much empty, since our bees had been so ornery about getting fed, but it seemed to be pretty well full right up, so who knows what their beef was.

This is where the real fun starts—at this point, you just upend the cage, and dump the bees out over their new home. The first shake gets a great huge pile of them, and after that you sort of have to shuffle the box back and forth to get them to fall out of the hole. Shaking a box of bees, knowing that they can get out, is a surreal experience. Even given that Jacob and I seem both to have been born missing the “afraid of bees” gene, we’re not nuts, and we do have a healthy caution for them. Consequently, having a hundred bees swarming all about your head—a hundred bad things that could happen but just aren’t happening—is an almost therapeutic experience. You know? All of these worries, and here I am, just fine, in the middle of it all. I can’t explain it to my satisfaction, though. All I know is that, by the time we got to this part, I was entirely refreshed from my killer week, and positively buoyant.

Once we’d gotten out as many bees as were reasonably going to come out, we propped the box up against the entrance board so that the rest could climb in. You could see bees that were just shaken out of the box there on the front porch, butts up in the air and wings fanning, sending out the “come home, come home, this is home” pheromone, which made me feel good about how everything was going. Slowly, steadily, we dropped in the rest of the frames, and I feel pretty good about our low rate of bee-squoosh-age. We put a gallon bag full of syrup on top of the frames and made a little slit for them to get it out of, dropped another hive body over it all to make room for the feeder bag, and dropped a lid on it. Rinse and repeat for the second hive, with Jacob and I trading off tasks so that each of us got to try most everything. We filled up a couple of mason jars with plain water and put them in the front entrances. (At some point, we’ll make some sort of waterer for all of the hives. I don’t know where the established hives are currently getting their water—obviously somewhere—but it can’t be but so close, and they’d probably benefit from something closer.) You’re supposed to put entrance reducers on new hives, but our entrance reducers, in combination with the Boardman feeders we bought, are actually entrance blockers (lame and stupid, considering they’re the same brand), so we blocked off a portion of each entrance with a brick, since there’s a great pile of bricks back in the yard. If you’re all to heck confused as to what this setup looks like, just take a look at the pictures and hopefully it’ll make more sense. The Boardman feeder is the bit of wood and galvanized steel with the big round hole, which is where the mason jar goes, perforated lid down.

We watched the other two hives a bit, though mostly we left them alone, especially the combined hive. There was plenty of activity on the porch for both hives, which is comforting, but there was, as yet, no evidence of the removal of the newspaper. It was wet when we put it in, so some of our “slits” were more like holes, so you wouldn’t expect them to have too much difficulty getting started on removing it. We were told to expect a litter of newspaper-confetti, and so far, nada. Well, if there isn’t something by the time we go back to check on the queen cages and replenish the feeders, we’ll have to figure out what to do next, but it’s probably nothing.

Oh, and a last note…a few days ago I made up the grease/sugar patties that you’re supposed to keep in the hives as a treatment against tracheal mites, and it turned out to be loads of fun, because the stuff models startlingly well. Here’s a picture:

I envision that years from now, it’ll be a much anticipated family tradition—“Yay! It’s grease patty time!”—and we’ll end up with all sorts of silly looking grease patties and Crisco all over the kitchen. Ahhhh.