Today was a big one in the world of bees. Our package bees are scheduled to arrive at 3pm. So it's up early to make sure everything is ready. The first thing I needed to do, was make sure my current hive is healthy and starting to grow this spring. That meant a full hive inspection.
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| Freshly painted hive parts. |
To inspect my hive, I pulled each frame to see if my queen was laying good eggs, and that I had a good amount of brood in progress. Luckily, she seems to be ready for spring and making more bees for me. The bees were very calm. Maybe that was because it was still cool this morning when I opened up the hive. My frames looked good, but my honey stores were just about gone. We need fresh blossoms quick so my bees have something to eat.
Then I made sure all my hives were packed up for my mom's house. I'm putting 2 hives in there this year. Well, I should say, one is Mom's and one is mine but both residing at her house. So I packed up a freshly painted starter hive. A starter set is consists of a base board, a Deep, a screen top or inner cover, and a cover. They looked so cute all ready to go.
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| My tool bag |
Finally, I restocked my bee tool kit. This is my second year with bees, so I learned to keep my tools in a nice handy kit whenever I'm working the bees. Some of the things I seem to always forget are matches to light the smoker, and scissors to "mow" the grass by the hive. I put them into my handy dandy took kit and I'm ready to pick up those bees. Other items in my kit are Hive tool, Gloves, spray bottle of sugar water, smoker fuel (gunk from the yard), bee brush, scraper too, and a ball of string.
Whoa! Did we look like something picking up the bees. I was wondering what people who were not in the parking lot for bees had to have thought. Can you imagine? you see a horse trailer with some bees flying around and about 40 people walking willingly towards it. Ha! We had to have been a site.
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| Packages are wooden & screen boxes. |
I picked up 5 packages of bees this year. Last year I had 2. One made it, one starved early this spring. So I'm replacing one, adding two and putting two hives in at mom's. That means a full afternoon of fun for me and the bees.
