Sweetening the pot for a package of bees
I put off deciding
whether to buy another package
of bees until April,
which means that our bees only went in the mail Friday. With such
a late start ahead of them, I figured it wouldn't hurt to prime the
pump by giving the new hive a box of nearly-drawn comb, partially
filled with pollen and nectar.
It was time to nadir the old hive anyway, so I
killed two birds with one stone, lifting the top two boxes from that
hive to the side, replacing the bottom box with two empty boxes, then
adding the full boxes of brood back on top. In a perfect world, I
would have left the quilt and roof on during this procedure, but I was
working by myself and figured that I could cut corners (and weight) by
removing those two components. I left the sheet of burlap on the
top box, though, so I don't think the procedure messed with the Nestduftwarmebindung of the hive too much.
Weight of the two boxes of brood was just shy of too heavy for me
(maybe forty pounds? or perhaps thirty since the bulkiness was the real
hindrance?).
Over at the new hive spot, I
got to scratch my bee-photographing itch. That's one of the major
downsides of the Warre hive --- you're not supposed to mess with
individual frames, so you rarely get to see your bees in action.
Isn't that beautiful, straight comb drawn without
foundation?
I didn't bother brushing
off the workers and drones who came along for the ride in the relocated
box, but I figure they'll go home tonight. Then I'll plug up the
door so they don't come back tomorrow and rob all that nectar right
back to their old hive.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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