We Have Bees

It was a big final week around the house as we prepared for bee pick up! With Earth Day being April 22nd, we took the opportunity to send our friends and family seed packets and info about our bee adventures.

We also finalized the apiary. Our plans to build our own stands fell short and we tried to save some sanity by buying hive stands. After a lot of back and forth and second guessing we placed the hives through a gate (now known as the bee gate) and behind our fence.

Putting them in the actual back yard would have provided more sun and the opportunity to watch the bees from the deck and patio but having dogs and the thought of trying to mow around them was just too much. You can see that the leveling of the hive stands proved challenging for us as our apiary is on a slope. Despite the look, it serves the purpose and seems to be sturdy and level. Once the outside set up was finished we had to tackle the assembly of frames…

Somehow the frames took over my dining room table. Keep in mind, these are only the frames for the deep brood boxes – not the supers. And I only have two eight frame hives. A little quick math and you can calculate that 32 of these frames need to be assembled. Now, we ordered five frame nuc boxes so that meant that I only needed three frames to finish out each initial brood box in each hive. While it is not difficult to place the wax foundation in the frames it does take time. Can’t say I’m super excited to make time to finish assembling the frames but I would like my dining room table back so hopefully this will get accomplished before the bees finish drawing out comb in the bottom brood box.

We also bought smoker fuel from Isabees and attempted to light and keep it smoking BEFORE we needed the smoker. There was a small learning curve but a little patience proved successful.

Finally, the day arrived…bee pickup. We purchased two nucs through the Eastern Missouri Beekeepers Association. I have had nothing but good experiences with this organization and would highly recommend any beginning beekeeper in the St. Louis area join their club. It was such a blessing that bee pickup day came with rain. The steady rain made the bees want to stay inside and it was so easy to secure the load and transfer them to our hive stands. We’d rather be wet than stung! And my little beekeeper was a trooper.

We transferred the nucs in the back of a truck just to be sure no bees would be free and in the vehicle with us. Once in position on top of each of our hives, we simply pulled the screens and waited a day for our bee mentor to arrive.

It was still very early once the nucs were in place. The rain had cancelled opening baseball games but our queen bee did take to the court appropriately in black and yellow – she’s a little less interested in the bee part and more excited about the honey. Until then we’ll be happy to keep her buzzing on the court!

We have been pretty excited about bees and forced one family member to serve as our mascot. Being the youngest in the family isn’t always easy…despite the cute pic, she hated the get up.

Because we had the time, I did stumble across a really cute bee cake in this blog: (https://beemission.com/blogs/news/spectacular-honeycomb-bee-cake) and we attempted our own version to celebrate our “BEE-day”! It was fun and a hit with everyone.

We watched the BEE MOVIE and then had bee cake! As we finished out the evening and the rain came to a close, I could almost sleep easy. I knew the next day would bring mixing the sugar water, meeting our bee mentor and transferring the frames from the nucs to our hives. The excitement and nervousness continued but the little beekeeper and I had a great time working through each of these events. A quick swing into the grocery store after church for ten pounds of sugar was enough to fill both bucket feeders. We then anxiously awaited our bee mentor who could not have been any more of a delight. A beekeeper of 41 years – we are so excited to have met him and look forward to working with him. He helped us get the frames from the nucs into our hives without using smoke!!!! No smoke?!?!?!? None. And all was just fine. We were able to spot one queen and hope the other one is in good condition too, despite not being able to get a visual on her…maybe next time. Or…things might get interesting early. For now we are to keep the sugar water feeders full and he plans to come back in 7-10 days on a nice, sunny day for our first hive inspection. That inspection will hopefully be another opportunity to see and learn even more! We’ll keep you posted…

Worker Bee 2021