Bees! In the Top Bar Hives!

I got my BEES!

Mary posted a little bit on her blog, but I want to put some on mine too. I'm quite psyched up about the whole process.

I drove down to overnight with my parents, which conveniently are about halfway to the beekeeper Don in Lula Georgia who keeps Small Cell (SC) bees. SC bees are kept organically, in that they are bred to resist mites and diseases. Also no chemicals are used on the bees like some commercial beekeepers use. The thinking here is that if the strong bees are bred, then you will wind up with stronger strains of bees, the weaker ones having succumbed to disease and such. Also the SC bees are quicker to emerge from their cells, and thus interrupt the varroa mite's reproduction cycle. Fewer mites reproduce, fewer mites to bother my bees.

I contacted Don last year in order to get on the waiting list for the bees. He does a good business, but is at the mercy of the bees, and Georgia is in that drought which makes the bees a bit slow to reproduce. Anyway, long story short, I was able to travel to get the bees.
I arrived at midday, completely surprising Don, because he doesn't check email very often. I had contacted him earlier in the week to remind him I was coming, and he confirmed. I also emailed that morning, but he hadn't logged on.
After introducing ourselves, I was shown around his apiary, and wow, did he have a lot of hives. We were walking around without any protective gear, and the bees completely ignored us. I had the occasional bee bounce off of me, but that was because I was between her and her hive. She just bounced off me, then flew around me to her home.
Don then collected up a couple of package boxes, the shaker funnel, and the scale. Don is extremely good a judging how many pounds of bees are in a box, just by looking. I guess for someone who has been doing this for 50+ years, that gets to be easy! Anyway, we opened hives, and caught 2 queens, and put them in queen cages, then opened other hives and pulled out honey frames, and shook new bees into the package boxes. It was amazing, I had on my veil, but Don didn't even worry about it. I didn't have on gloves, and had bees on my hands, but no stings. Don's SC bees are extremely good natured, and rarely sting.

At one point Don pulled up a capped honey frame, and invited me to taste pure organic honey. I poked my finger into the honeycomb and popped my honey covered finger into my mouth. The honey tasted fantastic! The bees would soon fix any damage I had done to the honeycomb after Don put the frame back in the hive.

Here is a picture of one of the package boxes sitting on my hive. (click pictures for a larger view)

It didn't take long to get them in the top bar hive. You can see that I am working the bees with no gloves on, and still no stings. For those that don't know, 2 pounds of bees is about 2500 bees.

This is me with the smoker. I smoked the bees a little for the first package, but didn't smoke the second package, just to see how docile these bees were. They were a little more agitated than the un-smoked bees, but still gentle.


And here is me holding the queen cage that has a ball of bees on it. I shook the bees off, so that I could open the little cork on the queen candy side, so the bees will eventually free her.



This last picture is after I've shaken the rest of the bees into the hive, and put on the top bars.


I put the lid on after that. Also inside each hive, I put a gallon zip baggie full of about 3 quarts of sugar syrup to feed the bees until they get going on their own. I poked some small holes so the bees could suck out the fluid. I'll get into the hives next week, and remove the empty bags, and check out the hives and see what the girls have been up to. Hopefully by that time, the queens will be out of their cages, and I can remove them.

I've been caught by my kids and wife, outside watching the comings and goings of these silly bees. My dear wife Mary jokes with me, "What do those crazy neighbors do on Sunday afternoons? Sit outside and watch the bees fly around." Well, I can't think of much that is as calming and soothing as watching those girls do their thing.

Mary was so fascinated by the bees that she wanted to look into the hive to see what they have done. She told me that I need to build another hive, and this one should have an observation window that we can open and see what is going on in there. I agree. But I'll put 2 windows, so that when we remove the shutters we can see through the hive and watch what is going on.