Hiving a New Package of Honeybees

Nicolas (with gloves) and Karine getting ready for the new bees

It is always exciting for a beekeeper to have new bees. This technique of hiving a package as it is called, is wonderful experience.
Nicolas and I hived our package on April 22, 2011. We were waiting for a bit of sunshine among the rain showers that seemed to fill the sky for many days.
Finally the sky cleared and we jumped in the car with all our gear and equipment. It was still gray but the rain had stopped. As we arrive at our destination in Chanhassen...it started to drizzle!
But we were there and our bees had been in the garage for 24 hours confined in a box. They needed to be released.

Spreading the bees

Ben had prepared the hive ahead of time, so we just had to place the bees inside. This year we had an observer, Liz who took all the pictures. I opened the package and took the queen cage and put it in my pocket to keep the queen warm. Nicolas shook the bees into the box. You can see the thousand of bees at the bottom. Now I am trying to "spread" them around with my hive tool in a thinner layer so I can replace the frames I had removed previously.

The Queen is in her own cage

Now that the honeybees were in place, I opened the screen from the little queen cage. I lowered my hand into the box among the humming honeybees, and let the queen crawled by herself onto the foundation. What a Grand Entrance for a Queen! Then I replaced the 4 frames carefully, keeping an eye on the queen making sure I did not injured her.

Nicolas and the pollen patties

 Before closing the hive, Nicolas place a few pieces of pollen patties on top of the frames for the honeybees. This will be their proteins for few weeks as we wait for the nectar flow. We also gave them 2 gallons of sugar syrup.

We the closed up the colony, the box has a cork plug and little pieces of grass block their main entrance. This is to make sure that the group of bees stay in this new dwelling with their queen. They don't know yet that it is their new home.

Honeybees in their new purple hive in Chanhassen