Hiving the girls

Last night, it was time to put the bees, or "girls," into their new home. Since there are only a few of the 20,000 bees that are male, we have been calling them the girls. There is one queen, a few drones (males) and the rest are workers, which are female. So, they are "the girls."

Before we could actually install the bees into the hives, we had to get the hives ready. We put cement blocks down, then the bottom board and the first deep box. Rod did all that, and while he was working on that, I made sugar syrup to feed the bees, and filled up the top-feeders and a squirt bottle, and carried all of that, plus the frames out to the bee area in the yard. We put ten frames into each deep box.

Once we did all that, we had to suit up! First came the coveralls I got at Napa. I tucked those into my Sorrell boots, and used packing tape around my ankles to make sure there wasn't a place a bee could sneak into. I also taped all the seams in the coveralls, as well as around my wrists. Then came the hat and veil, and the beekeeping gloves. What I sight I must have looked like. It was a good thing we were doing this inside the fenced yard - otherwise the neighbors might have been scared!

We carefully carried the bees, in their boxes, to the area in the yard where the hives were. Time to load in the bees! I went first. First I squirted the bees, still in their box, with the sugar water. This is suppose to make them more subdued and docile.

After squirting them, I gave the whole bee box a sharp rap on top of the deep box, to get all the bees to go to the bottom of the bee box. While they were there, I quickly took out the can feeder and the queen, then put the can feeder back in. They were not too happy about all of this, and were buzzing quite a bit. After getting the feeding can back in, I put the queen, in her little queen cage, into my pocket for safekeeping. I never thought I would willingly put a bee in my pocket, but that's what I did. Crazy!


Now it was time to put the girls into the hive. I quickly gave the box another sharp rap, took out the feeding can, turned the box over, and started shaking and dumping the bees onto the frames. Dump, shake, and then repeat, until as many of the bees were out as possible. All the while, I was "bee-ing" buzzed and dive-bombed by some of the bees that had decided to fly. After getting the majority of the bees out of their box and into the hive, I pried the cork out of the queen cage, held my hand down into the hive and gently shook the queen cage a bit. She came out and went into the clump of bees between the frames. I did all of this as fast as I could.

I gradually started putting the frames back in. I did this slowly so I didn't squash any bees. It took a lot of willpower not to put them back in fast since I was still being dive-bombed and buzzed. Next, I put the inner cover on, followed by the top-feeder, and another deep box.


The metal top cover went over the whole thing, and I stuffed grass in the front opening, so the bees would stay inside more and get to know their new home some before venturing out too much. They were in and I was done for now! It actually was fun. I didn't really know what to expect beforehand, but while I was messing around with all of them, it was both interesting and fun. And having all those bees around me, on me, and buzzing near my ears was not as bad as I thought it would "bee." I guess I should stop, at least for now, with all the bee puns, even though there are a lot of them I could use!

Rod was next, following all the steps I did. By the time we were both done, it was starting to get dark and the bees were in the hives for the night. Here you can see both hives, all set up and full of bees.