As I mentioned in my weekly post, I finally received my bees. I thought that I’d post with the pictures of the installation. This is my first install, so I’m sure that I made some mistakes. I didn’t have any glaring problems, though. It went fairly smooth and I didn’t get stung. I’m not going to have a lot of text, I mainly want to put up my pictures.
Heading down to the hives
I loaded the packages of bees into my yard cart. Put in my tool bag. I had to mix up some sugar-water to put in a spray bottle.
A new package of bees
Just a shot of me and one of the packages
Removing the telescoping cover
Off comes the telescoping cover.
Tearing down the hive
Then tear down the hive to put them in.
Suiting up
Put on the safety gear.
Removing the queen cage
Pull the queen cage. I sprayed them down with sugar-water so they wouldn’t immediately fly off. Popped off the cover and pulled her out.
Preparing the queen cage for installing
The instructor gave us the idea of using duct tape to make a sling to hold the queen cage. I used this idea and we’ll see how it works
Installing the queen
Then just hang the hive from 2 of the frames. One thing that I forgot to do was poke a hole through the candy plug. This isn’t required,but it allows them to them release her a bit quicker.
Removing the can of food
To get to the rest of the bees, I removed the can of sugar-water that fed them in transit.
Dumping in the bees
Then just dump the bees into the hive. I made sure most of the bees went on the queen cage.
Closing up the hives
Close up the hives and that’s that.
All done
The boxes in front are the packages. All the bees don’t come out of there. I put most of them in and allowed the hangers to go in on their own. I put the Boardman feeders on and left them alone. I’ll check on them in 3 or 4 days to make sure they released the queen.
Hopefully this is just the start of a long beekeeping hobby.
