It’s finally spring and warm enough to go pick up our bees!
We purchased our bees from Knights bees.
Look at all those bees! Each bee bus has 10,000 bees. This year we purchased 4 hives worth of bees. So 4 bee buses with 40,000 bees!
We are going to put 3 hives at Paul’s parents house and the other one at our house. I’m a little nervous to have a full hive in our yard with Eli running around, so we will see how it goes this summer.
Eli feeling all the bees legs that are poking out 🙂
Several bees were flying around in the jeep as we were driving home. This is the part I dislike, having 40,000 bees in the back and all the stow away bees flying around.
Paul surprised me with my very own veil. Last year I was without and was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt filming, now when I’m covered in bees I will have a little protection.
He even purchased some gloves for me as well!
Where was the 5 year old? Feeding the horses, of course!
With the first hive we tried something different. Instead of shaking them out, we just set the bees in and let them crawl out. In a week we will come back to see if they crawled out and if this is an effective way of putting bees into a hive.
We removed some of the frames.
That was easy enough. Now my turn to put bees in a hive! 🙂
I started with the queen bee. Removed the cork, put the candy cork in and placed her in the hive.
The I dumped the bees in. That was pretty fun!
We did the same thing with the third hive.
Each hive is a little different. Each hive opens differently, has a different size of frame and different breed of bee.
The hive above has Russian bees. The hive is a simple, traditional hive with long frames. A light top with a rock on it 🙂 They all have rocks on top.
Our second hive is the first hive we had last year. We put Carniolan bees in there. This is my favorite hive. It’s so cute, with lots of detail carved into the wood. This hive has smaller frames.
Our third hive has Saskatraz bees. This is our largest hive, has smaller and larger frames and opens differently. This hive will have a post of it’s own!
We left to our house to do the last hive.
It was quite late when we got home. I put Eli to bed and Paul decided to put the bees in the hive by himself. He was doing fine, and was almost done, when a bee got into his veil. Paul dropped the queen in her box trying to let out the trapped bee.
It was so cold out, we didn’t find her in time and we lost her. We found her crumpled up body and put it back into her cage, put the cork back in and put her in the garage. We are hoping Knights bees have extra queens. We will have to call in the morning.
Our hive is complete, minus the queen. This is a smaller hive, but significantly larger than the cute little hive last year. This hive is small, but long , has smaller frames and lots of wood carved details in the side. The breed of bees in this hive are saskatraz as well.
It was a very busy day, but we got all 4 hives done!