We bought four nucs (a nuc is 5 frames of bees and a queen) today from a fellow beekeeper who works for a large bee company. He helped us get these bees situated today before the rains came. We also bought 2 packages of bees but they won't be here until probably early May. It is still a little chilly up here in the north but the bees will be fine. We might need to feed them until the dandelions come, but right now they are going to eat some of the frames of honey from the hives that didn't make it over the winter. Each hive box now has 5 frames of bees and honey, plus 4 frames of extra honey for them to eat from last fall. We will also treat for any mites in about 10 days.
Here are some photos from this afternoon:
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| Our friend Josh waves to the camera! |
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| Josh uses a smoker to calm the bees down and Harold cleans up debris and checks for a good hive cover. The bee yard is a bit of a mess right now, as we did not get a chance to clean things up before the bees arrived. It has also been snow covered until just a few days ago. |
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| Harold and Josh inspect a frame of bees, looking for the queen. The nuc boxes are the small white boxes with grey tape on them. |
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| Josh inspects another frame while Harold covers up a finished hive. |
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| Josh points out a queen with the hive tool. You can just make out a bee with a red dot at the bottom left of the tool. Each frame had a healthy bunch of bees - lots of bees to start a good hive colony. |
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| Of course our ever-curious cats had to get into the picture! Here is one of our female cats, Whitney, coming to the bee yard. As you can see, the yard is still very muddy and just driving a car over the ground leaves good sized ruts. The snow just melted a few days ago, so everything is quite soupy yet. | |
And so, our bee business enters its 13th year! These 4 hives, plus the 2 others we bought will give us a good start for the year. If all goes well, we may be able to do a split or two and eke out a couple more hives. We hope this will be a good year for honey!
1 comment:
Just out of curiosity, do you buy a certain number of bees or do they sell them by the lb. or oz. or how? If they go by numbers, who counts the out? Just curios. You should have names for them too. Just suggesting.
Maybe I should change my name back to anonymous. Anyway, good luck with them little critters.
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