Wednesday, May 26, 2010

The New Bees







The New Bees


Sunday I picked up two packages of bees from Warm Colors Apiary in South Deerfield, Mass. Each “package” consists of a few thousand bees in a wire cage, with the queen in her own special cage, suspended within it, and a can of sugar syrup, at which they’ve sipped for the past few days on their journey from Georgia to Massachusetts.

Although a few bees clung to the outside of the packages as I put them in the back of the car, they didn’t bother the five human passengers, they were so intent on the bees within the cage, or perhaps the queen.

I had the choice of Italian bees, which I’ve always had, and Russian. I chose one package of each.

This will be interesting. Russians are reputed to swarm more easily, but they survive cold weather better. They even need fewer bees to cluster up and keep the queen warm. They may not be as gentle natured as Italians, either. But after the Amazons, my semi-wild hive, they seem pretty tame.

We drove home, and my son’s girlfriend, the good sport, read me the directions as I quickly hived the bees from their cages.

Lacking a mister to spray them down with pacifying sugar water, I poured sugar water on them through the mesh. Then I pried off the lid, and gently pulled out the queen cage. There she was, pacing within it, attended by her Workers In Waiting. Her cage was covered in bees already getting whiffs of her pheromones. I carefully prized out the cork that covered the wad of candy in her doorway, and lowered the queen cage into the hive, hanging it between two frames. Over the next few days, she will be eating the candy from her side, and her soon-to-be-devoted hive mates will eat the candy from the other side. If everything works out, and the workers accept her as their own, she will eventually be freed to roam around the hive laying eggs. The next step required a deep breath-- I just shook the soccer ball sized mass of bees onto the frames after her. They were so intent on getting near the queen and setting up house, they didn’t even mind, let alone try to sting me.

That will undoubtedly change, when they get to know their territory. Not everyone left the wire box, so I just laid in on the ground next to the hive, put on the inner cover, positioned the sugar water feeder over the hole in its top and went on to the other hive.

I’m supposed to leave the hives alone for a few days so the bees will bond with their respective queens, free them and begin the business of the season: laying eggs, rearing young, gathering nectar to cure into honey, thereby pollinating my garden.

Although this spring I’ve noticed a marked uptick in non-honeybee pollinators--there are, for instance, loads of bumblebees around-- I’ve still missed my girls. The farm seemed sort of empty without them. On Monday morning, when I went out to the back porch to water some hanging plants, I saw a honeybee cruising around looking for nectar sources. I was overjoyed.


Images: The bee package (3 times, I don't know why), the hive with the bees happily scampering about, and an empty queen cage, which is what I hope to see when I next look!

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