Day 0 - The first 2 packages of bees came, so it is time to put them out. Once the hives are all set up and in place the packages need to be opened. The queen put in the hive and the bees dumped into the hive.
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| Using the hive tool to open a package |
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| Removing can of food and the queen |
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| Temporary cover while working with the queen |
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| Queen cage |
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| You can see the queen |
With the package temporarily covered now that the can of food and the queen in her cell are out, we scraped the cork out of the end with the candy. This was where we almost made our first mistake. There is cork on both sides and it is the one with the candy that needs to be removed, the other should be left in place.
With the cork removed, we carefully poked a hole through the candy, but made sure not to hit the queen.
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| Dumping bees in the hive |
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| Bees on the bottom of the super |
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| Replacing frames |
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| A drone peeks out |
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| All frames back in the super |
Now with the queen on the bottom and all of the bees dumped in and the frames in place, now the feeders are put on. We used two different methods of feeding the 1 quart sugar to 1 quart water (by volume) mixture. One was a ready made top feeder with floats.
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| The feeder-super can be seen in this picture with the floats in. |
And the other was to support inverted mason jars with holes in the lid on pop sickle sticks.
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| Here is the inverted mason jar. |
Finally everything was closed up and entrance reducers were put in place to let the bees start to do their thing. Next check will be in 5 days.
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