The day has finally come - time to get my new fuzzy little friends. I had to drive all the way almost to Wisconsin, to Stillwater to get them. Seeing the familiar sign of Nature's Nectar always makes me smile, every year I have picked up bees this simple sign guides you in and tells you there is someone with a pretty good sense of humor running the show.
You can see in the shed there are stacks and stacks of crates of bees waiting to be picked up. I figured it out one time - how many packages and then ultimately how many bees are on a truck, etc, but I have since forgotten this useless piece of information. What I've always wondered is if all the bees flew in the air at the same time how much lighter the truck would become, but I'm going to leave that one to someone smarter than me.
So here are my two little packages, you can't really see from this picture, but in the center is a silver circle which is a can of syrup to feed the bees during their cross country voyage. Also there is a little metal tab that holds a small wooden box with the queen inside. All the bees huddle around her and the can of syrup to eat and keep her warm. They constantly rotate around so they all get to eat and take turns being cold on the outside. Before I put them in the hive I sprayed them with syrup and water to make them super mellow and happy - mainly so they don't fly all over the place.
This next picture is the two hives I am going to be putting the bees into. I've taken 4 of the frames out to allow room to dump the bees and have everything all ready to go. So when I'm ready I'll pry up the syrup can and then pound the cage on the ground so all of them fall down. Then I slip out the queen...
Here is a picture of the queen in her little cage. What happened next did not go according to the master plan.
What I was supposed to do was put this right in my pocket, dump the bees in the hive, pull her out of my pocket, put a little piece of marshmallow in place of the cork holding her in and the put her in the hive with the rest of her buddies.
What I did was put a piece of salt water taffy in place of the cork first (I forgot to buy marshmallows and didn't have time to go to the store). Then put her in my pocket and then dump the bees in the box. When I went to grab the cage - she was missing. I said a few four letter words (like golf and Iowa) and looked around for her. I gave up on that pretty quick and put the cover on and moved on to the other hive.
The other hive I did quite well and they seemed to be doing fine when I left for work. I sent a few emails and after a call to one of my old pharmacy professors (who happens to keep bees and is a SD state bee inspector - yes there is such a thing). He told me that I could simply take a frame with fresh eggs out of my strong hive from last year and put it into this new hive. If there are eggs less than 3 days old they will feed the eggs royal jelly and raise a couple of queens which will then mate and presto-chango I have a hive with a queen in it again. The only difference between a queen and a worker is the food they are fed and the amount of time they take to hatch. Workers actually take longer to hatch than queens - mainly because of the difference in the food they are fed.
The alternative to do nothing is not a good one though. If I just let all those workers and drones in the hive go on with out some sort of intervention, a few of the workers (who are all female) will start laying eggs of their own. This is not a good thing, since they have not mated all their eggs are unfertilized and they will only lay drones. They will keep doing this until either all the bees die or they decide to move on. If I let them do this and then try to give them a new queen later they will kill the new queen.
So I will hopefully be able to salvage a situation brought on by my own bonehead blunder. If this works and they make a queen that goes out and mates I should be able to salvage the package and although it will not likely make any extra honey this year I will have saved them and they will hopefully be strong enough to make it through the winter.
So hopefully I can get my lazy butt out of bed in the morning and do some rearranging. To be continued...
3 comments:
I really enjoy reading about your bees. I like finding out how things work, especially in the natural world, in a concise, but interesting, way. You do that and with humor thrown in, which is always good. I say golf and Iowa sometimes, too.
Salt water taffy, Dan...?! And I was so smitten with the marshmallow part! ;)
Thanks, it's so there are so many things to learn about bees. Writing about them helps me sort it all out. One other fact is that when they raise a new queen from the frame I gave them from the other hive this morning they will actually raise several and then kill all of them but the strongest one. Just bizarre how thousands of bees can act like a single person.
And yes I am sorry I didn't have marshmallows - I even dug through all the cereal to see if there was any lucky charms or something like that. I may still end up getting a new queen to put in the hive and if that is the case I will make sure to have marshmallows to use! Sorry to disappoint you Kristy.
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