Hive Day!

Today Brandon and I drove up to Santa Rosa (to Bear Foot Honey Farm) to pick up my bee hive! Cheryl (beekeeper/owner of Bear Foot Honey Farm) helped us load the bees in to Brandon's car so we could drive back down to Los Altos (Brandon was very excited - that's sarcasm if you can't tell).

We also picked up the remaining suplies that we needed (another deep, a medium super for honey, and Apiguard - a medication to kill mites, which are one of the suspected causes of Colony Collapse Disorder). In the picture below, the deep is the unpainted box (which I'll paint later), the medium is the painted one, and a that little blue box has 2 treatments of Apiguard in it (one for now, and one again in August). Both supers are filled with frames (where the bees will create the honey comb, in the deep they will also make cells to hold eggs to raise more bees). There is one frame off to the side - right now the hive has 9 frames and one feeder (filled with sugar water that they can eat). Once the hive is established and out collecting nectar and pollen on their own, I'll replace the feeder with that extra frame.

We picked up the bees around 7pm, you have to wait until the evening to move them because most of the bees will be in the hive. During the day, most of the worker bees are out collecting nectar, so you don't want to move their home and leave all the bees out in the field. We got down to Los Altos around 10pm and put the bees in their new home.

Cheryl said that I shouldn't open the hive to do an inspection for at least 48 hours, otherwise the bees become too stressed out. Instead of blaming me for the stress, they would blame the queen and kill her - NOT a good situation. If the weather was better, I could open their front door so that they could go out and explore their new area, but there is a storm forcast all weekend. Keeping their front door closed is how we keep them from escaping into the car, and you would usualy just open it up the morning after you move them - but we'll wait for some sun so they don't all run out and get lost in the rain. Below is a picture of the mesh Cheryl put over their entrance, I guess you can't really see it that well in the picture, but there a few bees trying to get out (that was before their car trip, after we got them down to Los Altos, there were hundreds of bees on the mesh trying to get out).