Pride of ownership

Today we are officially beekeepers--that is, we own bees now! We met up with the owner of the hives, Michael, his daughter Theresa, and our mutual mentor Brenda at River Farm at 10:30 in the morning. The place was swarming with people for an Easter egg hunt. We ended up buying three hives, in a manner of speaking--one hive (on the left in the picture below) is very strong, and one is large but its queen had apparently run out of sperm, because she was laying mostly unfertilized drones. The last one is quite small and weak, but possessed of an apparently healthy queen. So today Brenda took away the dysfunctional queen, and we'll leave the bees to sweat it out until Monday, at which point we will stack the large hive on top of the small hive with a piece of newspaper between. The bees will shred and remove the newspaper in a couple of days, but meanwhile the bees in the top hive will have time to get used to the pheromone of the small hive's queen, and should hopefully accept her, at which point everything can go on its merry way. We also bought an extra medium super with ten frames of drawn comb from Michael, because the less time the bees spend drawing out comb, the more time they spend collecting honey.

Here we are popping the inner cover off the dysfunctional-queen hive. We went through all of the hives pretty thoroughly to check for queens and general status. In the case of this hive, it was particularly important, because we had to find and remove the queen if we could, and if we couldn't find the queen, we had to ascertain if perhaps we had laying workers (workers, who lack the necessary ovarian development and sperm, trying to lay eggs in the absence of a queen), which would have been a tricky situation to fix.


Here's the view from the gardens down to the Potomac. It's a really lovely, really excellent site, and we feel quite lucky.


Who could resist that smile?

Checking the frames:

Putting things back together:

The queenless hive got very ornery towards the end of our inspection. Jacob got stung several times overall, though all he has to show for it now is one slightly red spot on his side. I didn't get stung for a long time, despite bare hands (dang bulky hot icky things, gloves), but my hood was gapping badly in the back, so that when one did get me, she got me in the neck. Obviously, we're going to have to work on our wardrobe. By the time we were on our way home, though, the sting was barely a reminder--the sun and heat were far worse.

All in all, we ended up spending $300 for the hives, bringing our total investment up to around $1000. So, not the cheapest hobby to get in to, but after this initial investment (we need to get a few more things--at least a couple more queen excluders), there won't be much upkeep money. Besides, unlike a lot of hobbies, this one bids fair to pay back a lot of its investment. One woman who was at the gardens stopped to talk to us, and immediately asked if she could buy honey. We told her that there wasn't going to be any for a while, but we exchanged contact information. She was of the opinion that she knew a great many people who would be interested in buying truly local honey. The gardens are in the sort of neighborhood populated pretty well entirely by people with more disposable income than we're used to, and even off in a corner, beekeepers draw attention.

We had a lot of fun, even though I think today was the warmest day so far this year. Brenda and Michael both seemed very pleased with our comfort level and confidence handling the hives. I dunno...we're just not fearful people, I guess. I am glad there are two of us, though--it'll make things faster, easier, and companionable to boot. We're really going to enjoy this. The bees are just so cute! ;-)