On Friday May 5th, I took a deep breath and drove to a warehouse in Woburn to pick up our package of bees. There were dozens of bee packages and quite a few bee stragglers flying about. I got a few words of encouragement from our "bee lady" and loaded them into our car.
The bee package weighs about 3 lbs and contains approximately 10,000 bees. You could hear the bees buzzing in the car, so I turned on the radio as the sound of bees buzzing is a little stressful while driving on the highway.
The day the bees arrived was rainy and cool, but there was a small window of dry-ish weather, so I installed the package as soon as I got them home. I suited up in my bee jacket and opened the hive. I removed two frames from the hive and spritzed the bees with sugar water. Then I quickly popped the top off the bee package and gently removed the special cage that holds the queen. I used a rubber band to secure her cage to one of the center frames and poked a hole in the fondant plug that keeps her secure in the cage. Over the next days, the bees will eat the fondant and release her from the cage. I then removed the lid and sugar feeder from the package and tapped the bees down inside their box. I then shook the bees into the hive and it was the craziest thing I've ever done. The bees literally fall out of the box in clumps. I had to alternate tapping the bees down and shaking them out of the box. I was a little shaky, but managed to stay pretty calm at the same time. There were bees swirling all around me and landing on my face mask. I completed the installation and re-assembled the hive with no stings! After a couple of days, I started to notice lots of bees circling the hive while doing orientation flights.
After 5 days, I opened the hive to do my first inspection, with the main goal being to confirm that the queen had been released. I noticed a few bees hanging outside of the hive, one of them with visible pollen. Pollen being carried into the hive is a positive sign, as it provides a source of protein for baby bees.
It was amazing to see how much work the bees had done in just a few days. Several frames were well on their way to being built out with honeycomb and I could see cells filled with pollen and nectar. The queen bee had been released from her cage, so I considered it a successful first inspection!
I found a few dead bees outside the hive (a common housecleaning practice as bees have a pretty short life span). The bee on the left is a male drone and the one on the right is a female worker bee.
I did my second inspection a week later and it was very exciting! I actually spotted the queen, larvae, and eggs! I also spotted my first "problem"...burr comb. The frames should be evenly built out with honeycomb, but I discovered a large ball of burr comb between two frames. I wasn't quite sure what to do, so I took a picture and consulted with one of my beekeeping contacts.
You can see the queen on the right side of the picture below, just about in the center of the picture. Her large, brown abdomen is visible.
After consulting with my bee mentor, I went back into the hive a few days later to remove the burr comb. This picture is after I removed the burr comb and you can see honeycomb filled with what will be honey one day.
The colored cells are filled with "bee bread"...a mixture of pollen and nectar.
Look closely here. The cells that have white caps on them have maturing larvae inside. The uncapped cells also have larvae in them (little white worms) that will be capped soon as the larvae age.
A few angry bees that I swept off the burr comb that I had to remove. I'll be saving burr comb to one day make lip balm or candles!
