B-Day Has Arrived!

I received the call around 10:30 AM on Thursday, April 19th.....the bees will be ready for pickup at 2 PM!!  I left work right after lunch and headed home to pick up my wife for the short journey to St. Charles.  I placed two empty deep hive bodies in the bed of the truck strapped in with a bungee cord to house the packages and help shield them from the wind.  The weather was cool and there were signs of impending rain in the sky.  The 20+ minute drive seemed interminable and my nervousness and excitement continued to build the entire way there.  Finally, the GPS directed us onto Wahl road where T M Klein & Sons Honey was located.  We turned onto the gravel road and I began to wonder if my GPS had lead me astray when I saw a "Local Honey For Sale" sign.  That must be it!  We turned in and my fears were quickly abated as I saw row upon row of beehives sitting on the lot.  My wife and I hopped out of the truck and after waiting a short time for another person to pick up their packages of bees, we were directed into a large shed to get our bees.  Wow, I have never seen a package of bees in person before, let along hundreds of them stacked four feet high!!  A few straggler bees flew aimlessly around our heads as Mr. Klein picked up our two packages and carefully brushed off a few "cling on" bees.  They were loaded into the boxes in the back of the truck and off we went.

The journey home was uneventful.  Well, besides me being constantly worried if the day's cool temperatures (low 50's) and if the now lightly falling rain was giving "the girls" a deathly chill.  I know, it is a bit pathetic isn't it?  =)

We arrived home and promptly placed our two new packages of bees in the pole barn.  This is where they would recover from their journey as I made the final preparations to install the packages. 

First step, prepare the sugar syrup feed.  Since a package of bees has no resources stored up to feed themselves and with the weather poor and flowers few, it is a good idea to give them some artificial feed until they can feed themselves.  In the Spring time, a ratio of 1 pound of sugar to 1 pound of water is recommended.  So, I weighed out 5 pounds of water to match my 5 pounds of sugar and commenced boiling.  When the water reached a boil I shut off the heat and stirred in the sugar which quickly dissolved into the hot water.  I transferred the hot syrup to a 5 gallon bucket to allow it to cool.  Second step, wait for the syrup to cool and obsessively review in my mind over and over how I will install the packages.  Did I mention
waiting for the syrup to cool?  Come on! 

At this point, my wife and I were both getting fidgety and the time was approaching 6:30 PM.  It's go time!  Let's do this thing!  We suited up in our bee suits and grabbed the bucket of syrup and headed out to the pole barn.  I put some of the sugar syrup into a spray bottle, some into a mason jar with holes poked into the lid for the white hive and the rest of the syrup was destined for the top feeder in green hive.  Now we double check that we had all the tools we would need.  Hive tool, bee brush, spray bottle, bucket with syrup, a small nail to put a hole in the queen cage's candy plug and.......the bees!  We walked boldly out to the hives with our equipment and the first package of bees wondering if any of the neighbors were watching the "weirdos" in the white suits next door.  =)

I have watched many videos and read many methods to installing a package of bees and I decided that I would lightly spray the bees with sugar syrup, spray the frames with sugar syrup and do a slow release of the queen by poking a small hole in the exposed candy plug that would allow the worker bees to gradually eat through it over the next few days, thus freeing the queen.  Thank the good Lord that both installations went very smoothly with only one or two minor hiccups.  I started with green hive and removed the top cover, the top feeder and inner cover.  Then I removed about half of the frames and set them aside.

I sprayed the frames and then sprayed the bees lightly with the syrup (making them slightly sticky, less apt to fly and occupied with cleaning the sugar off of themselves).  I then used my hive tool to pry the staples out of the small piece of wood covering the top of the package.  The staples were in there really well and it took quite some time to dig them all out. 

We decided that it might be a good idea to have a pair of pliers around when we did the second package.  With the piece of wood removed, the can of feed within the package is now exposed and I pried it out.

 
I quickly replaced the piece of wood over the circular opening left by the can of syrup and set the can down on its side so I would not squish all the bees clinging to the underside.  I then pried up the staple holding the strap connected to the queen cage, lifted the wooden cover while holding the strap, and removed the queen cage.  You couldn't even see the cage with so many bees clinging to it!

I moved the queen cage over to the hive and gave it one quick shake, knocking the clinging bees off and quickly checked the cage to make sure the queen was alive.  Check!

 
Using my hive tool, I then pried out the small bit of cork in the candy end of the queen cage.  Then, fumbling around in my pocket I got ahold of the small nail I brought and cautiously poked a small hole in the now exposed candy plug, making sure not to skewer the queen inside! I then placed the queen cage between two frames near the side and tried pushing them together to hold the cage in place.  Of course, all the bees wanted to sit right between the two frames.  After some cajoling, I was able to move the bees and hang the queen cage where I wanted it.  I hooked the strap over an adjacent frame and called it good.  Back to the package of bees, I gave them a few more spritzes and readied myself for the "fireworks". I removed the wood cover and slammed the package onto the ground, knocking the bees into a cluster on the bottom.  I then upended the package, dumping them vigorously into the empty area of the hive body where I had removed the frames earlier.  The last few remaining bees I dumped directly on top of the queen cage.

I set the mostly empty package in front of the hive entrance and carefully placed the inner cover onto the hive.  After a few attempts with bees being in danger of getting squashed, I was finally able to lay the inner cover down.

 
The hive top feeder then went on and I filled each reservoir with sugar syrup.  The top cover went on and I was done!!  All of this in just over 5 minutes!  My wife bravely recorded the entire event with only a
jacket and veil.  She had bees landing on her hands during the process and she only freaked out a few times!  =)  For the second package installation, she nicely asked for a pair of gloves and that I close up her pant legs with some duct tape.  I think this made her much less nervous  =)  We then proceeded to march back to the pole barn and retrieve the second package of bees with the addition of a pair of pliers and the mason jar feeder that we had filled previously. 

The installation into the white hive went just as smoothly.  There was a bit of a surprise when I pried off the wooden cover to find that there was a large hole cut into the box that was then exposed!  I just placed the cover over that hole and continued the installation.  I have the black Honey Super Cell (HSC) frames in the white hive and that made it a bit easier to place the queen cage as opposed to the foundationless frames in the green hive.  I flipped the mason jar feeder upside down to let the initial squirt of syrup out and as the dripping stopped, I placed it upon two wooden shims I had made and then placed the top cover on.  Done!

All in all the installation went very well and the bees were very calm despite all the rough treatment.  We received zero stings and to my knowledge, did not squash any bees.  Our clean white bee suits were dotted with a few yellowish/orange spots so our biggest calamity during the installation was
getting hit with a bit of bee poo!  =)  In hindsight, with the temperatures as cool as it was, I may not have needed to spray them at all with the syrup before installing them.  Also, I didn't take notice if the candy plug was facing up or down when I hung the queen cages.  Looking back at the photos we took, I can see that the candy end was on the opposite side as the strap, so it would be facing down.  I've heard people say that it should be facing up so that if any of the attendants inside the cage die, they would then fall to the bottom of the cage allowing the queen an unblocked exit.  Not sure it really matters but I guess I'll find out soon enough.

My next task is to check the amount of syrup left in the feeders and check to see if the queens have been released.  I am currently targeting Tuesday for these tasks which means they will have been in the hive for about five full days.  I'm not sure if they will have gone through all that syrup in that amount of time but hopefully the queens will be release and laying eggs into some newly constructed wax comb.  The next update will be coming soon!  Thanks for reading.

Hives Deployed

After hours of meticulous painting and another few hours of artistic detail painting from my wife, the hives are complete!  I put a coat of primer and then two coats of paint on the outside of all the boxes, the bottom board and the telescoping cover.

My wife bought some stencils and put the flower and bee outlines on, filled them in with some color and finished it off with some dotted line bee trails.  I think she did a great job and the bees will have the best looking house in the neighborhood!!  Donchathink?

Before "empurtyment"

After

With the advice we received from our fellow beeks, we wanted to get the hives out early and empty.  The idea being that if any neighbor would react negatively they would probably do so as soon as they saw the hives.  It wouldn't prevent any issues but at least we might get an early warning of who might have concerns.  Well, we were hoping to have them out about a month early but I guess a week early is going to have to work.  I cut a strip of pine to exactly fit the entrance of each hive so no mice or other critters will get in before the bees arrive.

Speaking of bees arriving.......t minus 6 days and counting!!  April 19th is the day!  I still have a lot of work to do before they get here. 

Some of my tasks include:
  * Rototill the bee garden
  * build a bunch more frames
  * put starter strips in the remaining deep frames
  * melt the beeswax and paint it on the starter strips as well as the plastic Honey Super Cell frames
  * find a glass jar to use for a hive feeder (I have a top feeder for one hive but not the other)
  * buy some sugar so I can make some 1:1 syrup to feed the bees when they arrive

Construction and Education

It has been a busy winter as I ramp up to prepare for my new arrivals on April 18th!  I have continued to build the components to my second hive and I am almost finished.  I have completed the construction of a deep and two medium hive bodies,

Boxes Galore

forty deep frames (wired with the help of a wiring spool setup that I cobbled together)

Wiring Spool

as well as a screened bottom board and a top cover.

Screened Bottom Board

Top Cover

I still need to construct an inner cover, another medium hive body and forty medium frames.  Once that is finished, let the painting begin!

With the winter so unusually mild for Michigan and today's temperatures in the 70's it seems as though I should have started the bees about a week ago!  I still have to wait for an entire month yet!  Grrrrrr........  In the mean time, I have begun to get involved with the wider beekeeping community.  My wife and I attended our first meeting of the Saginaw Beekeepers Association (http://saginawbees.org/) on March 6th.  It was good to get in touch with other beekeepers from our area and to hear of how well most of the bees have overwintered.  One of the members gave a talk on drone laying queens and also brought in a frame that had American Foulbrood on it so we could all smell it.  I would almost compare the smell to wet dog but it was very distinct and I hope I don't smell it again!  After the meeting was over we also had the chance to meet a number of other beekeepers that lived only a mile or so from us.  I guess we aren't the only ones after all!  I'm sure all the members there will be a great resource in the future.  My wife is a social butterfly and she easily connected with a lot of the people there.  Another benefit of the meeting is that I think my wife now has been "bitten by the bug" and she is excited to become involved in beekeeping with me!  Bonus!

When it rains, it pours you know, so of course the Michigan Beekeepers Association's (http://www.michiganbees.org) Spring Conference was on the Saturday of the same week.  My friend Keith and I had attended last year and we went again this year.  The opening talk by Dr. Jim Tew (http://www.onetew.com) was about laying workers, how to identify and deal with that situation.  He is an excellent speaker and his presentation was very interesting as well as funny. 

Vendor Area

The break out sessions we attended were on Top Bar Beekeeping, Beekeeping and Insurance, and the final class was on Pests and Disease.  All in all a very worthwhile trip and to top it all off, my friend Keith (who hadn't really planned on being a beekeeper anytime soon) won a door prize.........a package of bees!!!  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH! 

We have a winner!

I'm still laughing at the whole thing  =)

Bee Garden

So, if I'm going to be responsible for taking about 20,000 honeybees from their nice snug home, have them rudely and violently shaken into a small cage and stick them with some high and mighty Queen that they don't even know, then I suppose I should make a nice place for them to live, right?  The hive body itself is one thing, their surroundings is something else.  Thus, my latest hairbrained idea.......the bee garden. 

Now, I know the actual benefit from planting a bunch of bee-friendly flowers around the hives is probably about nil.  Since it takes about *two million flowers to make one pound of honey and I'm only guessing that the amount of pollen collected from these same flowers might be only slightly better.  The actual number of flowers I'll be planting isn't quite in the million range =)  Despite this, I'm hoping to at least have a visually pleasing place for the bees to live.  And I suppose at the very least, my wife should love the flowers.  I am no landscape architect to be sure but here is my concept:

I wanted to put the garden and hives in the back corner of my property so a triangle shape seemed fitting.  I plan on lining the edges with some cheap brick (about 150+ of them by my estimate) and on the two opposite corners I am going to stack the bricks up two or three levels to create a raised bed for some herbs.  Splitting the triangle in two will be a walking path.  Not sure if I will mulch it with some bark or maybe even some gravel.  At the right-angle corner will be a wider area where the hives will go.  The entrance of each hive will be facing generally South, so they should point to the back corner.  This should make it easy to approach the hives as well as enjoying the flowers without being directly in the flight path of the bees.  Originally I thought to have a bird bath in between the two hives but my wife had read that the bees like to "cleanse" as they leave the hive so it isn't a good idea to put their water source right in their flight path (or poo-path as the case may be).  So, as you can see in the drawing, I think I will put the bird bath in the middle of the walking path instead.  The edges of the path around the bird bath are shown as straight but I'm planning on bowing them outward a bit to follow a semi-circle around the bird bath. 

Planning on the general layout of the garden was the easy part.  Selecting the flowers, determining the area they would take up, the season in which they would bloom and how tall they would be was much more difficult.  A lot of research went into this and I bet the final result won't look quite like the drawing.  I was hoping to save some money by growing most of the flowers from seed.  Sadly, in the course of my studies, I found that the majority of flowers I selected were perennials that would not bloom the first year if I chose to grow them from seed.  The Coneflower and Zinnia are the ones I am going to try growing from seed.  Hopefully the color comibinations of the various flowers won't end up looking like someone scattered a random selection of paint cans in the back yard!  My wife will be the ultimate judge.

With all the planning done, I had to start the actual work.  I had read that the best time to start a new garden bed was in the late fall.  One method is to turn over all the grass/sod so the roots are facing the sky.  This is suppose to kill all the grass over the winter and come Spring you can till all the now dead grass into the soil and provide a nice infusion of decaying organic matter for the soil.  With my luck, I will end up with grass growing between every brick and under both hives!  All I can say is that I REALLY underestimated the amount of manual labor involved in turning a 30' x 30' area.  I thought I was in pretty good shape since I attend kung fu classes and play in volleyball leagues on a regular basis.  Well, it won't be the last time I was wrong about something. 

All in all it took me around 8 - 10 hours over the course of about a month.  I would work for an hour or so here and there when I got the chance.  I started at the long end and thankfully each row I turned over got shorter and shorter as I worked toward the narrow end.

At least I finished before the snow hit!  Well, one more thing off the bee checklist.  Next?  Order my packages of bees right after New Year's day!

*http://www.honey.com/nhb/about-honey/honey-and-bees/

I've Been Framed!

Since deciding which bee suit/veil combination was such as dramatic struggle for me, it wouldn't be possible that making all the equipment decisions would be any easier!  Fortunately or not, I have already read three books on beekeeping (Beekeeping for Dummies, Complete Idiots Guide to Beekeeping and The Beekeepers Bible) and turning what I've read into a concrete action is a big deal.  Each book has a different philosophy and approach to what kind of boxes to use (all mediums or mediums and deeps), what style of hive (Langstroth, Top Bar, etc) and frames (plastic foundation, foundationless, Honey Super Cell).  So after much consternation I decided what approach to use and ordered all my equipment, minus one Langstroth style hive that my son-in-law built for my birthday.  Despite some reading to the contrary, I decided to use two deeps for brood and then mediums for all the honey supers.  I also decided that I like the idea of a more "natural" approach and I will be using some Honey Super Cell (HSC) frames to start my packages on and have foundationless frames for the rest.  Well, who knew how expensive HSC frames would be?  I planned on starting with two hives in the spring but at $6.25 per frame, that is $125 for 20 frames!!  Shipping cost is not included either!  I had read similar reactions on other blogs so I am going with a half way approach.  I bought 10 frames of HSC and I will put my packages on 5 frames in each box.  I'll make some follower boards for the extra space in the 10 frame boxes.  Once the queen is using the all HSC frames to lay in, I will slowly introduce my foundationless frames.  After the first generation of bees is born they should all be regressed and they can build whatever cell size they want on the foundationless frames.  We'll see if theory turns into reality.

Speaking of frames, I have enjoyed assembling them so far.  I really want to build all my own boxes but the detail in the frame pieces (not to mention the quantity of them) made me steer clear of attempting to make those myself.  Here is my first effort at frame assembly

and wiring....

It has been a long time since High School wood shop, but I managed to assemble eight frames so far and I still have all my original fingers!

Decisions Decisions

You wouldn't think choosing a particular type of bee suit and veil would be an epic task of life changing proportions.  But when you start making a decision from a base of zero experience and no real point of reference you can get hung up on an endless stream of what ifs.  I like the way the collapsable veil looks and the only potential drawback that I can see is that you can turn your head and the veil does not turn with you.  The other types of hanging veils attached to a pith helmet wouldn't seem to have the same issue.  Not sure if there are any other factors to even consider.  So after way too much obsessing, I finally made a decision and bought it.  https://www.dadant.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=672

Sad to say that if it took this much analysis to determine one of the simplest items I will need to start beekeeping, what will it take to decide something really important!