Monday, May 23, 2011

Busy little bees

Due to all of our electronics being tempermental(everything always has to go wrong at once right?), I am just now able to share these pictures with you guys. They are from the Saturday after we installed them, and this is what they did after 3 days! It truely amazes me what these girls can do in such a short ammount of time.


You cant really tell due to all the bees covering it, but there are 3 little ovals of comb under there, and the bees are filling them with the sugar syrup. :)


And this is from my Langstroth hive, dont worry its comb that was covering the queen cage so we had to cut it out. The yellow stuff is pollen! And I cant even believe how perfect each little cell is, bees are amazing creatures!



After these pictures were taken, we have had a cold rainy spell, and when we checked on the bees next, they were all huddled up together. We didn't stay in the hive too long, because of the cold though. They are still getting their 1 to 1 sugar syrup, so I hope they dont die off, not being established yet and all. I guess all we can do is wait and see, and we will be checking again on their progress this week hopefully. Wish us all the best of luck with this crazy weather.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Russians and Italians..... new bees that is!

The new bees are here, the new bees are here!! We are now official Apiarists!

Wednesday we finally went up to pick up our bees up at Parsons Gold Apiaries. They have so many hives, just sitting around the place, and bees flying in and out of the garage, so we knew that was where to go. You would not believe the sound the bees made in there, it legitimitely sounded like all the fans were on, but it was just thousands of buzzing bees. And there were bees flying free just around your head and landing on you, it was all I could do not to freak out at first :) Anyway we had ordered two 3 pound packages of bees, one with a Italian queen for me, and one with a Russian queen for Dad. The family there really helped us out, and gave us a dry run of installing the bees, just to give us an idea, which turned out to be really helpful by the way, and we asked every question we could possibly think of, and hoped we were ready!

The Italian queen went in a Langstroth hive, and the Russians in Dads top bar hive. My hive came as a kit from Walter T Kelley, but Dad's hive was built by himself and Rick, a good friend of his. The installation went without a hitch... and no one got stung! We just hope and pray that they do well and produce a bountiful harvest :) I am just so excited I cant contain myself :0D

So here are our 2 videos, we hope you like them!