Because we needed another hobby to add to the list, this year we became beekeepers! I’ve been chronicling the whole journey on Google+ in a collection but thought I’d do a post here to catch the blog up to speed. We picked up our nucleus or “nuc” box from Swarmbustin on May 20th at 7pm. Why so late? So that all the foragers were back in the box and we brought home most if not all of the bees belonging to that hive. By the time we made it home, it was dark, so we took off the protective screen across their entrance and let them hang out in the nuc box that night. Prior to pickup, we had bought all sorts of boxes, frames, etc and had those prepped and ready to go. The next morning, we set up our hive and transferred the frames over. It was our first real experience working with bees, so we were a little bit nervous, but the bees turned out to be a rather docile sort that wanted precious little to do with us. We located the queen, snapped some photos, and set them up in their new home. Later on that day, we caught them running orientation flights, flying back and forth in front of the hive to memorize their new home, and they were returning later that day with pollen and nectar.
Since then, things have gone really well! The four original frames expanded and built out comb to fill the 8 frame deep box fairly quickly. We added a second deep, checkerboarding out the filled frames with wax and wire foundation frames in early June . In mid June, we noticed some peculiar behavior that we later identified (thank you, YouTube!) as washboarding. The bees stayed out all night doing their weird little dance across the front of the hive. The hive got a name, Hive Hyrule, and Queen Zelda was working hard laying eggs EVERYWHERE. The hive expanded pretty quickly, and we freaked out a little when we caught them building empty swarm cells at the bottom of a few frames. We later found out that’s pretty normal, they keep them around as insurance, and if we destroy them, they’ll just build them again, so it’s best to let the swarm cells stay, but keep an eye on them.
Just last Monday (early July), we split the hive, taking two frames of eggs, a good frame of capped brood, and a frame of honey/pollen storage over to a nucleus hive in an attempt to rear our own queen. We thought we had Queen Zelda locked in on another frame in the origin hive, but she somehow got onto one of the frames we transferred, leaving Hyrule queenless. Well, they wasted no time in building out 5 queen cells! By the time I checked, a week after the split, the cells were capped and due to hatch in about 8 days. This means we ran a successful split, and it actually turns out to be a happy accident since it allows the nucleus hive to build up faster with an existing queen instead of having to wait on their own. Hyrule is packed with bees and they have no problem getting by with a gap in queen activity.
And on to now – we have one hive, Hive Hyrule, with two deeps and a medium honey super which I’m not sure we’ll actually get honey out of since they had to build out the comb first off wax foundation. The second hive, Axiom, with formerly Queen Zelda, now Queen Eva, is standing in two deep nucleus boxes, running regular foraging missions, busy all day long. We’re feeding the nucleus sugar syrup to get them to build out their comb faster, and we’re hoping Hyrule fills up that honey super before fall. They’re packing the rest of the hive with pollen and nectar and capping honey, but there’s not a lot of activity in the honey super. For our first year, things are going VERY well and I’m terribly smitten with the girls (and the dozen or so boys they keep around). It’s been a delight to stop by the hives in the morning and evening and watch them fly in and out, hard at work. We’ve had a few stings, but they’ve all been our fault (bees getting stuck in clothing/shoes or where they shouldn’t be and then stinging when they get pinched/stuck). Turns out neither of us are allergic, and while it’s not fun, it’s not terribly painful, but really itchy for a few days afterwards. I end up with what looks like a bruise for about a week afterwards too. It’s worth it though to be giving them a home and helping out honey bees. I know a lot of our neighbors have small backyard gardens, so the bees are kept plenty busy and haven’t been a bother to any neighbors that we’ve heard of so far, except for one who noticed them drinking out of his bird bath and was curious as to where they were coming from.
I do plan on keeping the blog updated on bee stuff from now on out though, but the best place for updates is the collection on Google+.