The Secret Life of Bee Busters

January is productive!

2012-01-06T09:36:00.000-08:00

Gooooooooooood mornin' bee people!
I am here to announce that our bees have been VERY great to us.
We checked out our boxes the other afternoon when it was a nice 80 degrees out (thank you southern California weather).
What we have found is that our ladies have been working really hard throughout the winter and have produced for us an amazing amount of honey! This is not really something we were expecting, seeing as how we have had a very strange winter weather.

Below is a video, courtesy of the gentlemen beekeepers, that depicts the discovery of the impressive work of our bees.

As you can see, Kris is not wearing his beekeeper's attire because these bees are a very docile European variety. In this whole entire journey, he did not get stung...at all.
Later on, we may have a video of the difference between a feral Africanized honey bee colony and a Euorpean bee colony. We did an experiment on the two colonies we have right next to each other last spring. The difference between their reactions is huge!
Until next time, have a wonderful weekend!

What Santa's beard should be made of!

2012-01-03T09:04:00.000-08:00

Hello again!
I hope everyone had a wonderful vacation and a wonderful New Year.
We will be getting some video up on the blog in the next few days or possibly tomorrow, if you are good, but today I would like to post for you what I believe would make Santa's beard jealous...
A bee beard...enjoy.

This is the boss bee getting a very buzz worthy beard from our very own bee's.

**Pay attention to the gentlemen in the back-what'a HOOT!**

Getting Ready!

2012-01-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

It's a new year! Guess what that means...NEW BEES!
That's right! We are getting ready for the spring here at the Bee Cave, which entails many different activities.
Just the tip of the to do list starts out with a cleansing of the bee equipment.
Here are some spiffy images of the boys hard at work re-vamping the boxes with a fresh coat of paint and making sure they are sealed well.

Just getting started!

This just looks silly...

Like a pro!

GRRR! Painting with vigor!

The finished products next to the...dirty, not so finished products...

Getting every corner covered!

Team work!

Almost done!

Finished product!

THE BUZZ- Insemination

2011-12-21T11:07:00.000-08:00

UC Davis Bee Research Facility

Last April, BeeBusters technician and Head Beekeeper Kris Fricke went up to the UC Davis Bee ResearchFacility to take classes in the artificial insemination of queen bees.

Naturally, queen bees go on one mating flight in their life, during which theymate with 15-20 drones (male bees). They fly far from their own hive to do thisin order to ensure they do not mate with drones from their own hive (with fewerchromosomes in their genes, inbred bees are even more dysfunctional than inbredpeople). This one mating flight will allow the queen to remain fertilizedfor the rest of her life (potentially 5-7 years!)

Early attempts to mate queen bees simply by putting them in a small cage withthe desired drone were ineffective --apparently queen bees just won't feel the romance unless a very long flight isinvolved.

As such artificial insemination (also known as instrumental insemination) isthe only way to control precisely which drone (and therefore genetic line) aqueen bee mates with. This is important if you are trying to breed beesfor very specific traits, or are in an area such as we are where there is avery high chance they would mate with Africanized bees if they went on a normalmating flight.

The class was hosted by Professor Sue Cobey of UC Davis, and consisted of abouta dozen beekeeping professionals from all over the United States. Therehad been more people who applied to take the class but room is limited becausethe professor and her staff can only teach the complicated procedure to a fewpeople at a time, so applications had been carefully reviewed . Fortunately, our beekeeper Kris made the cut. Also in the class was aprofessor from Nicaragua, a grad student from another bee lab, and an GreekOrthodox monk from a monastery in Florida

Photo of class: (Sue Cobey holding a frame)

The process begins with collecting the sperm from the drones.

And here's a picture of the Box o Drones!

Then the queen bees are sedated with carbon dioxide. For reasons whicharen't entirely clear even to the experts, this temporary sedation also seemsto make the queen bees more effective later than bees that were neversedated. I guess a good nap does a lot of good.

Pictured here, wecheck that the carbon dioxide is flowing by putting the ends of the tubes in abeaker of water and watching the bubbles!

(also pictured, Brother Daniel's amazing beard!)

Then... we magically very very carefully inject the sperm into the sedatedqueen bee using very official looking equipment with super scientific names!

Kris helping this queen achieve the perfect brood!


A shot of the dissecting microscope!

Here's the queen bee's rump seen through the microscope!

A few minutes after being take off the carbon dioxide the queen begins torevive. We place her in a small cage with some worker bees who will take careof her, and she's ready to be transported to where she is needed and installedin a beehive!

Kris has named her Queen Bee-opatra!

As you can see, she is perched on his finger as hefeeds her. Is that not adorable?

She is officially artificiallyinseminated and ready to produce pure un-Africanized brood!

Bbbrrrrrr!!!!

2011-12-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

Hello there and good winter's weather to all you followers!

It has been an interesting few weeks, what with the stronggale force winds in the southern California area and the chilly weather. Wehave been keeping very busy making bees wax candles and going to events to sellour honey and said candles.

Melting pot-the other "liquid gold"

The Persimmon Festival at Pitcher Park went wellwith honey tasting, candle sales as well as everything and anything you canthink of that contains persimmons!Another fun bit of information, we have ourobservation hive, seen in the GORGEOUS image below, up and running for ourpresentations for groups all through-out the year.

Let us observe the beauty of it all!

The observation hive is justa structure that we use for…observing…the bees at work. We take a fairlyhealthy colony with a few different frames, like some brood and capped honey,and place them in this carefully constructed box, so that we can take it toschools and club gatherings that wish to learn about bees. This way we can showthem what happens on the inside of a bee colony, without the incidental beesting or poke-fest from the children (and sometimes the curious adult or two). The queen and some of the workers in thecolony are show-cased doing what they do best, being bees! You can see thequeen laying her eggs and the rest of the colony working away to make the honeythat we love so much. If you would like us to do a presentation at your gathering or school and live in Orange County, feel free to contact us! We would love to show you what the BUZZ is all about!

See you next time!


GO MY HONEY BEAR ARMY!	SPREAD THE LOVE!

Honey Extraction Version 20.11

2011-10-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Hey loyal followers!

We've finished up ourextractions for the year and are preparing for the winter ahead. If you areinterested in enjoying some of our harvest, the honey will be available throughAmy at OC Local Honey during the Persimmon Party November 13th at Pitcher Park.You can find information about this event at www.PitcherParkOrange.org. Here are some AMAZING images of theextraction in process!

Here is Devin in his very MANLY beard cover and hair net. Placing the first frame of the batch into the extractor!

First bucket!

LIQUID GOLD!

The honey goes through a series of filters to extract the unwanted extras that may be in the frames, like pollen or wax from the frames themselves.

Here's Devin again uncapping another frame for the extractor.

This is an example of the things you probably don't want in your honey. That's little bits of pollen and wax that will either be discarded or placed into another machine that melts the wax for use in candles!

I love the smell of honey comb in the morning!

Package Bee Odyssey 2011

2011-04-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again, time for packages of bees!!

Unfortunately since we're in an area of honeybee africanization, propogation of bees is difficult without accidentally introducing africanized genetics into your bee yard population. So to build up our population in early Spring we order packages of bees from professional bee breeders up in Northern California.

Pictured above, the process begins with the bee breeder's employees shaking bees from their hives through funnels into collection cages.

As we pulled in to the bee breeder's facility (front driveway, with truck-sized scale, pictured above) the day before our pick up we saw a number of little trucks headed out to shake bees into packages, no doubt getting the bees we would be loading up the following day!

That Thursday afternoon we were just there to go into the administration building and make sure our order was all squared away. Pictured above you can see their very lovely administrative office, with a very nice view out the window.

Friday morning began at 6:00 AM. We hopped in the truck and drove from the hotel in exciting Willows, California, to the nearby breeder's facility. There we backed our truck into the loading bay at the same time a beekeeper who had come from the opposite direction (Oregon) did so from the other side:

And they loaded us up with packages!

Giving the bees a little rest from the trials of transportation.

Back in Orange County on Monday, we invited members of the Orange County Beekeepers Association to come help us install the packages.

At the end of package shaking there were a LOT of bees in the air.

Everyone who helped with the package installation had a good time, and the bees have been doing great. We added supers (a second level on the hive) to many of the new hives just a week later!

Springtime for Bees

2011-03-18T08:42:00.000-07:00

It's Springtime in the bee yards!

The above is a really good illustration of the different things bees use comb for. On the upper edge is capped honey storage, and to the left of it you can see some honey that hasn't been capped yet. Below on the right you see brood comb -- under those brownish cell caps larval bee pupae are developing. And to the left of that in the multi coloured cells you see pollen storage!

Topbar Hive!

2011-01-14T09:06:00.000-08:00

It began with a dream. And a bunch of scrap wood. It looks like that one piece of plywood was one we used to cut the ends for the bee vac cages out of, and those are spare stakes from staking our hives against strong winds.

Our beekeeper Kris is going to be doing beekeeping with the Peace Corps, possibly as soon as April. We were discussing that in undeveloped regions they usually use topbar hives rather than langstroth hives, and we only use langstroth hives. (for the non-beekeepers out there, a "langstroth" hive is the "standard" rectangular stackable bee box you see, a topbar hive is the thing you'll see in pictures in this entry!) In order to give Kris some experience with topbar hives we decided to make one!

Topbar hives are easier to build in areas with no infrastructure because they're easier to make with no resources than a langstroth hive. Langstroth hives fit together like puzzle pieces, which is convenient for assembly if you have them, but it means you need good woodworking equipment to make them. Topbar hives you can cobble together from whatever you have at hand, such as the materials we scrounged together above. Additionally instead of honey being extracted from frames with an expensive centrifuge, combs are harvested from topbar hives by pressing the frames with an easy-to-make comb press.

So Kris came up with a design for a topbar hive. There's ample designs on the internet, of all different dimensions, many not really giving reasons for the specific dimensions used. Kris reasoned that we might as well make the dimensions compatable with a langstroth hive, that way, since we DO have a centrifuge extractor and langstroth honey supers, we could stack honey supers on top of the topbar hive. If this scheme works and can be implemented in undeveloped areas it would also make the eventual transition to langstroth hives smoother.

Looking around on the internet we haven't seen any other example of anyone trying to make a langstroth compatible topbar hive, so we're interested to see how this works out.

So we came up with a design and Bee Busters technician Ryan whipped it out that very afternoon:

Devin, another of our beekeepers, painted it white while painting a batch of newly assembled langstroth boxes. Now we're only missing one little thing... BEES. Unfortunately at this point its the first week of January.

Fortunately, this is Southern California and swarms can be found at any time of the year. This morning Bee Busters technician Shane came in with a small swarm he'd collected in his bee vac (another Bee Busters original design).

So we deployed the topbar hive forthwith!

And at around 08:05 this morning installed the bees!

I checked on them about two hours later, they had all left the cage and moved into the hive, and the entrance had a steady traffic of bees on orientation flights!

And now, we're going to bottle some mead...

2010 In Review

2011-01-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

JANUARY: Wildfire extremely close to Bee Yard D --

See also: more pictures of the firefighting vehicles, and more of the charred aftermath.

FEBRUARY: Truck Consuming Mud!

MARCH: JAR O BEES!

Some movie makers want a jar o bees for a movie, not a problem!

JULY: Honey ready for harvesting in Bee Yard G.

(Not pictured: and then we harvested it)

OCTOBER: Bracing hives against high winds:

DECEMBER: Tis the Season to Colonize a New Apiary!

Truck loaded with some hives from Bee Yard G

Hives arriving in Bee Yard H

Bee Yard H!

DECEMBER: Rainy Season Again -- FLOODS!

Remember the truck engulfing mud up above in January? Well the year's gone full circle and here we are again! In the picture above the bridge to Bee Yard H is out. The location can be approached from the other side but that road too was barricaded off. We approached on foot to get this and the below picture, were finally able to drive in a week later.

The bees turned out to be fine but the river embankment encroached alarmingly close to the hives! Compare the above picture with the one a few above it which shows almost the same shot except the entire area that is missing in this picture is still there.

Jar o Bees

2010-03-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

Kris Fricke, one of our beekeepers, holds the jar of bees

"Bees in a jar!"
"What??"
"A film crew wants bees in a jar!"

Apparently they had previously called another beekeeper, who brought them bees but could not fathom how to get them into a jar. And then they called us.

They called the right people! Bees in a jar? No problem! When and where?

The first thing we did is use a "beevac" to vacuum a swarm into a container similar to the one pictured above. Though many beekeepers use beevacs, we designed the one we use ourselves and have tested it extensively. We now have it perfected so that we can capture swarms with nearly no casualties.

Kris Fricke, one of our beekeepers, then took the swarm to the set of the film shoot. Because we could easily discern that the ventilation within the jar would be very inadequate (even after we punched air holes in it) we didn't put the bees in the jar until the very last minute. Finally the call came to get the bees ready. Into the jar they go!

As you can see, this just consists of shaking the bees right into the jar through a funnel. I should caution you "do not try this at home" -- Kris is extremely experienced working with bees. He has a tested tolerance to a few hundred stings so he knows what that feels like and that he can handle it, and note that he still has a beesuit close at hand in case things go sideways. It is also done out in the parking lot far from anyone else.

But as it happens these bees were extremely docile and working with them went without a hitch. Even after transferring the bees to the jar, Kris didn't place the lid on until the very very last minute due to ventilation concerns. Production crewmembers were very wary at first but presently, seeing that Kris wasn't getting stung, several ventured to come over and meet the bees and talk to Kris. As always he was more than happy to answer any of their questions and they found the bees fascinating.

Finally the call came for the bees on set. Kris placed the lid on the jar and was concerned to find the temperature of the entire jar immediately rose noticeably and condensation formed on the sides. The film crew members who had come and met the bees were similarly concerned about the bees health, and after determined the bees were NOT going to be used on set immediately the producer had the jar of bees given back to Kris to be unlidded until the true last minute.

The actual use of the jar of bees on set was only about a thirty second shot, which of course required several takes. It was still probably only 15 to 20 minutes that the bees were being used. The moment they were done Kris took the jar and dumped them back into the larger ventilated container. Despite concerns, it appeared that there had been no significant bee loss from their time in the jar.

Epilogue (apilogue?): in the morning Kris dumped the bees into a new beehive. First he placed among the frames in the box several that had honey on them from another hive so the bees would have some immediate sustenance. The bees appear to be doing fine and in fact he easily spotted the queen, she seemed quite lively and healthy!

Wildfire: the Aftermath

2010-02-25T11:23:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I came up to the bees and found the meadow next to them full of forest service fire trucks, using it as a base camp to fight a nearby fire.

More recently I decided to poke around a bit and walked up to where the fire had been. It was really only a few hundred yards from our bees!!!

The following (and above) pictures show the desolation from that wildfire!!

Where the wild pineapple grow!
(okay I'm pretty sure it's not a pineapple)

Of particular note, in one of the mostly-intact charred trees near the centre I found a feral honeybee colony! They seemed to be truckin along just fine! Enough time has passed that they may have moved into a burned out hollow since, or perhaps the fire just didn't burn very big and hot there (I suspect that was near the start point). Was unable to get close enough to inspect them for varroa and/or otherwise evaluate their health ;)

Altogether wandering the desolate wastelands was definitely interesting and impressive. Glad it stopped where it did though!!

Other Hazards to Beekeepers: Truck Engulfing Mud!!

2010-02-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

Only a short time ago we were dealing with wildfires near the bee yards, now we have the opposite situation -- the rain has saturated them!!!

And we got stuck up to our axles in mud! We tried digging out the tire, but more mud and water poured in as fast as we could dig it out. We tried putting things under the wheel such as dry dirt, rocks, pieces of wood, nothing worked. So we dug an entire ditch to drain it:

Even with this, however, water continued to flow in as fast as we could get it flowing out, forming a little stream. The ground was really saturated!!

After trying everything we could we called one of our other trucks up. Takes an hour to get from civilization up to where the bees are so out already-lengthy attempt to free the truck had stretched into its third hour by the time the second truck arrived.

Careful not to get BOTH trucks stuck in the mud we hooked up a cable and ran both trucks and.... the flatbed didn't move so much as an inch. It didn't even sway.

Finally there was nothing else for it. We drove down to the nearest paved highway and called a towing company. Recovery towtruck: $200 an hour, point to point.

Another hour wait for the towtruck to show up, but finally it arrives!

Attaching the cable from the towtruck:

Towtruck took all of about 30 seconds to pop us out of the mud!

Pictured: mud, without our truck in it!

And we were all on our way! About five hours after initially getting stuck in the mud!!

Presentations

2010-02-12T08:50:00.001-08:00

Been continuing to do our favorite thing, educational presentations about bees!

above, a kid tries looking through the "bee goggles," which simulate a compound eye by way of kaleidoscope lenses.

Above, home school kids at Pitchers Park
(the OCBA maintains a small permanent beekeeping museum at Pitchers Park on behalf of the city)

above, a garden club at the Fullerton Arboretum

All presentation are provided free of charge on behalf of the Orange County Beekeepers Association

OCBA 2010

2010-02-09T09:39:00.000-08:00

It's another year at the Orange County Beekeepers Association! This year David was elected president (pictured above being sworn in along with Vice President Jim Ludiker (left), and Richard Heryford (right)).

Our first meeting was in February and it went great! We had a fantastic turnout and everyone enjoyed it. There was a demonstration on candle making and a fun game in which people won beekeeping supplies.

This upcoming year we have some very exciting speakers coming up:

April 6th - Dr Eric Mussen, apiculture, UC Davis, expert on honeybees
May 4th - Missy Borel, horticulture, UC Davis, expert on bee-friendly flowers and member of the Haagen Daz Bee Board
October 5th - Dr Robbin Thorp, entomology, UC Davis, expert on native bees
November 2nd - Dr Jerry Hayes, Apiary Inspector, State of Florida, one of the preeminent beekeeping experts in America.
To Be Scheduled - Dr Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, appearing via videoconference, one of the preeminent honeybee researchers in America

The Orange County Beekeeper's Association meets the first Tuesday of every month (except for July & August, due to the fair)

Other Hazards to Bees: Wildfire!

2010-01-19T07:57:00.000-08:00

The apiary we have affectionately and creatively named "Bee Yard D" is located at one end of a beautiful and peaceful meadow. It is far removed from the hubub of the suburbs, there is no cell phone reception, and other than wild birds and other critters the only movement is usually just two horses that live on the property.

So imagine my surprise the other day when I arrived to find the meadow filled with trucks. Green forest service fire trucks, support vehicles, and most interesting of all, a helicopter taking off in the very middle.

Not pictured: the helicopter that just took off in front of the white truck there

I asked a nearby firefighter what was going on and he pointed to the hillside across the meadow, where not more than a few hundred yards from our hives the ground was black and smouldering!

It's hard to see in this picture, but the burn area is just above the left green truck. The bees are behind the twig on the right
(see also this better version of the picture)

Pictured above, there's even fire trucks lurking around Bee Yard F!

None of our bees were harmed by the fire, and on the bright side as you can see things are starting to get green in the yards again! Especially with this rain, we should have a very good season come spring!

Persimmon Festival Photos

2010-01-04T16:10:00.000-08:00

The Persimmon Festival in November 2009 was a huge hit. It worked out wonderfully that the California's Gold with Huell Howser TV episode showcasing the Honey House and Pitcher Park aired a re-run the night before the event! The OCBA opens the Honey House for this event that is all about persimmons.
Our honey and candles were so popular that people were buying them before the festival started. We virtually ran out of our candle supply and almost all the honey too!

David Marder the 2010 OCBA President, his sister Lisa Marder, and Amy Cripps the office manager for Bee Busters and Secretary for the club, were there to represent the club. We had a great time talking to people about the health benefits of honey and the importance of bees in agriculture.

Here you can see the inside of the Honey House with David talking about beekeeping. We worked very hard last year to scrub the place down and make it nice and shiny to show off to the public. There are many items in the museum that illustrate the work of a beekeeper and life of a honeybee. Some of the items are originally from the Pitcher family collection. Mr. Pitcher was a beekeeper and shop teacher so he invented and built some of his own equipment.

Winter Happenings

2010-01-04T14:19:00.000-08:00

During the winter months beekeepers have some ritual projects that must be completed to get ready for the coming spring. Equipment must be rehabbed, painted or repaired if needed. It is important to have all your wooden ware and tools in good shape for when new packages arrive. This means we are busy building new boxes, building and wiring frames and cleaning old ones.

Frames of wax need to be changed out every so often for good hive health. While bees can use the same comb for years, over time it will get pretty icky. Old bad combs can harbor pesticides and diseases so lets clean that stuff out! Changing out frames in rotation is the recommended way to go. Also, some combs are not being utilized because of lower bee populations during the winter. They need to be stored properly so that they stay in good shape. Now what to do with the old stuff? Well, melt it down of course. Our wax melter is basically a very large double boiler. While the process is slow it gives us lots of wax to make candles with. We made loads of candles in different shapes, sizes and colors. Some were even special for Christmas and hand-painted. They have been selling like hotcakes. And at least making candles is a little bit more fun than wiring thousands of frames. Just ask our techs!

Helping Hand

2009-10-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

Pictured: Bee Busters owner David Marder and an employee helping a local beekeeper out. Members of the local beekeeping community often call us or stop by to ask if we have equipment they can borrow, where the best place to get whatever they need is, or just pick our brains on a beekeeping issue on their mind. We always love to do whatever we can to help

Presentations!

2009-09-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

We love to do talks for kids, in fact it is one of Bee Buster's owner David's favourite things. He donates his time for this, as a representative of the Orange County Beekeepers Association.

David never turns down an opportunity to fulfill presentation requests. Requests come from schools, private schools, science camps, home schooling groups, and organizations like the kiwanas and gardening clubs.

David likes to make the talks very personal and interactive. Utilizing a lot of props, he likes to provide his audience with a very interactive and fun experience.

The "bee vision goggles" simulating a compound eye are always a hit.

The kids often never run out of questions. After the teachers have run out of time for the organized presentation Dave often has many eager kids who still have burning questions.

A summer science camp.

OC Fair 2009

2009-08-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

Another successful season at the Orange County Fair completed!

Bee Busters and all our employees are very enthusiastic about getting involved in the local beekeeping community and encouraging people to take up this extremely rewarding hobby. As such we're all involved in the Orange County Beekeepers Association and the OC Fair.

Most of our employees volunteered some hours at the OCBA Fair booth, and even those that didn't actually make it there were able to help on projects like the observation hive and "beeosk" back in the shop.

Observation Hive
An Observation Hive is basically like an "ant farm," of bees. It consists of four frames from a normal hive placed one above the other with glass on either side, as pictured here:

The observation hive is property of the OC Fairgrounds, but OCBA maintains it. We brought it into the shop before the 2008 fair and gave it a major overhaul, and again in 2009 we cleaned it up and gave it a fresh coat of paint.

The bees that were placed in it came from one of our hives. During the fair they had access to the outside world through a tube at the top of the observation hive that led out the back of the tent.

Beeosk
The "beeosk" is a kiosk we made and covered with informational posters about bees. We placed several silly puns involving bees on it such as "Beetube" (Youtube), and "Beemail" (a mail slot for leaving us feedback or questions).

We made the beeosk for the 2008 fair and used it once again in 2009. In preparation for this year we touched up the paint where needed and replaced the "beetube" part of it. Previously we had had a flatscreen tv monitor mounted inside it to show informational videos about bees, but glare had made it hard to see the screen so this year we replaced that section of the beeosk.

We ordered some "bee vison goggles" from an educational supplier -- goggles with basically kaleidoscope lenses in them to simulate the compound eye. We attached these to the beeosk and replaced the television screen with a large picture of a flower as seen in ultraviolet (which bees can see) so fairgoers can "see what a bee sees." Kids loved them and even adults thought they were pretty neat!

Altogether we (along with all the other OCBA volunteers) had a great time, and so did the many fairgoers who came by. It's always a pleasure to talk to people about bees.

New Bee Yards!

2009-06-23T08:08:00.000-07:00

With the addition of our new packaged bees, we've needed to expand to three new locations. Fortunately we had three beautiful locations ready to go! The above is one, here's another:

("Bee Yard E" is hard to photograph because it goes around a corner)

We had already prepared the other two locations, but needed to prepare one more:

So we spent a day with gardening hoes and rakes clearing out the dead leaves and debris. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of the area showing it before we did anything, but in the above picture you can see the raked area in the foreground and the rest is relatively untouched.

After a grueling day with the gardening implements, our new location was ready to go!

Here's Dave placing the first hive into the new location:

Move in day:

And with all the hives moved in:

Installing Bees in Hives

2009-05-14T11:51:00.000-07:00

Today we installed packaged bees into their new hives. David had driven up to Central California yesterday and returned with 100 boxes of packaged bees. After a resting period of a day and a half in the cool, well ventilated warehouse, the bees were ready to be installed in their permanent homes. We drove toward Lake Elsinore to where the new hives were located and moved the bees into their new homes.

The bees that David purchased are called Golden Italians. They are a very light amber color and are extremely gentle. They are also strong honey producers and very resilient to disease.

I don't care if you've been keeping bees for a month or for 30 years, there is nothing as cool as installing a package of new bees. Bees that haven't yet established a strong hive are extremely docile and the chance of receiving a sting is very low. The bees are only interested in moving into an acceptable home, so they want as little interaction with the beekeeper as possible. This is the time when the bees are the most docile and sweet-natured.

The best time to install the bees is in the early evening, but since we had 100 packages to install, we got started a little earlier - around 3pm. First we checked to make sure that all the new hives had entrance reducers in order to protect the new bees from a potential robbing situation from other, more established hives. We lightly misted the new bees with water in order to reduce flying and then lit our smokers. We removed 3 center frames from each of the new hives and gently shook each package of bees into a hive. Once the bees had sufficiently spread out inside the hive, we gently replaced the frames and then prepared to install the queens.

The queens can fly, so it is extremely important that when the cork holding the queen in her cage is removed, the queen is prevented from flying away. One of the saddest feelings in the world is watching your $20 queen fly off into the trees. We replaced each cork with a piece of marshmallow (years of experience have taught us that marshmallow works best, but soft candy or granulated honey also works) then gently placed the queen cages into each hive about one inch from the top with the screen side facing down so that the attendant bees could continue to care for the queen until she is able to leave her queen cage. We gently brushed exposed bees back into the hive and then replaced the hive top boards.