Bee Progress

After their first week, our third hive has grown enough to need a new hive body and frames. The same hive managed to consume a quart of sugar water in the last day. The other two hives have a bit of catching up to do, but they seem to be quite active. Hopefully by next weekend they'll be ready for another hive body.

Although the starter kits we ordered from the Wake County Beekeeper Association came with a single hive body and a shallow super, we decided to use a second hive body on each hive. This builds a larger (stronger) hive and will hopefully aid in swarm prevention next year when we will reverse the order of the hive bodies to "trick" the bees into thinking they have more room.


In addition to the extra hive bodies, we also picked up a few "medium" sized supers. These are just tall enough to fit over a quart jar when feeding the bees sugar water from the top. Next year we'll use them to collect extra honey for ourselves. Each medium super should hold around 35 pounds of honey when they're full, so if we're lucky we'll get a decent amount.

Bee Arrival

This morning Carrie and I drove to the other side of Raleigh to pick up our three nucs. The bees we bought (and won) came in a cardboard nuc box with five deep frames. The first thing I noticed on the way back to the pickup was how warm the bees kept the boxes. It was hot enough to melt the wax coating on the sides of the cardboard nuc and transfer it to my shirt. I guess that's what I get for wearing a new shirt...

We finished loading the pickup and made our way back home. Once home, we moved the nucs to the back yard where we had already placed our hives. Since the bees had been on the road for about four hours, the suggestion was to open the nuc entrance and let them fly around for a while before installing them in the hives. So we set them free, and I went off to take a nap (it seems ~4 hours of sleep was not enough for bee installation).

Around 2:00pm we decided that the wind wasn't going to calm down any further, so we geared up, lit the smoker, and headed to the back. Since the hives have ten frames and the nucs have five frames, we started by putting four of our new frames in the hive (two on each side) to have some extra room. After very slowly (to avoid bee squishage) transferring the five frames from the nuc to the hive, we inserted the final new frame and closed up the hive. It took around 30 minutes to do all three hives with a little time spent adding more straw to the smoker and waiting on the wind to stop gusting. All without getting stung :).

About an hour later we returned with the jars of sugar water to start feeding the bees. We decided to feed them from inside by placing the jars on the inner cover with a second hive body surrounding the jar. For now, we have them offset on some small pieces of wood, but since the hives are on a small slope the jars seemed a bit unstable. So we may just end up placing them on top of the hole in the inner cover if there is a problem.

By the end of the day it looked like the bees were adjusting and the stragglers that were left in the nuc boxes were finally making their way into the hive. We'll see tomorrow how quickly they can devour a quart jar of sugar water. And hopefully they'll make it through the 42 degree low we're supposed to have tomorrow night. Maybe that will be the last of the 40 degree weather.

Who said small stinging insects can't be romantic? (It's our 9 year anniversary today.)