Bee Log #15: March 2, 2010

There are 72 medium hive bodies assembled, primed and packed into our little shed. Our venture of placing hives in homes around north Seattle is off and running. I ordered 12 packages of bees. Ready or not here they come so we had better be ready! These are living creatures and require our attention. We are getting all the associated hive parts and will be setting up the hives sometime this month so the empty hives are in place and ready for the bees arrival sometime around April 17. Then the fun starts.

So many things are running through my head like insurance, bee feeders, sugar supplies. (The bees need to be fed for awhile until they get established and feed on their own. We do not have honey collection supers on the hives when we are feeding sugar.) We want our host families to be not just satisfied with the placement but excited and happy. We want a honey crop and a market for the honey and wax.

Bee Log #14: March 1, 2010

One hive (hive 2) consumed the sugar water with thymol and two hives did not touch the stuff. The two hives (hives 1 and 4) that are not consuming any sugar water were formerly given frames of honey from the deceased hives. I am continuing to feed hive 2 sugar water without thymol.

We have taken all sugar water away from the front of hive 1 and put on supers since it is so active. We peeked inside after seeing a lot of bees out front and saw that all ten frames were full of bees. This hive has been active at cooler temperatures then the other two hives since early in January. Earlier inspections showed empty frames that were not all the way drawn out in the top deep box. (A drawn out frame is one on which the bees have made wax cells.) It would be nice to prevent swarming in this box but on the other hand, it would be nice to perpetuate this queen bee's genetics since the hive is so vigorous at lower temperatures. We need to watch for queen cells and make a hive split if we spot them.