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Hello everyone, Cyndi here, hoping you all had a wonderful holiday season. Ours was a stressful one but everything has turned out alright.

This is George’s birthday month so I bought him a bee hive. He’s been talking about it for some time so I surprised him. I bought a Hoover Bee Hive kit from amazon.com and I thought I had done pretty well.

As George started researching it, we learned that actually, he would need a lot more stuff. What I bought was a brood box with five frames. A bee hive needs a brood box like this and then a Super to start. You have to get the bees and you have to hope they stay!

Supers are the shorter boxes that sit on top of the brood box and store the honey. The way it works is the bees live in the brood box, and that is where the queen lives and has babies. Then the supers are where the honey is stored to feed the bees during the winter. In our zone, we have mild winters and the bees may not even need a whole super to feed themselves during the winter, but as the hive grows, you can take some of the honey and leave the rest for the bees to eat during winter. The ratio of bees to needed honey will depend on your winters and the number of bees you have. You can also supplementally feed the bees if the weather turns cold.

George called a local Bee Club because that is a thing; and learned that to be successful, he would need two hives which include a brooder box and at least one super…you shouldn’t harvest honey for the first year anyway. But the plan is the have two supers, one to feed the bees and one to harvest honey. Then he can add to it as it grows. The mentor from the club said it is common for the bees to leave the first year but if you have two hives, one might stay and grow into the other hive or you can buy more bees the next season. You pretty much order the bees and then they become available in the springtime.

How to get bees

The Hoover Bee hive I bought is a ten-frame box with five frames. The frames are where the bees and the honey live, it’s where they build honeycombs. From my understanding, there are four ways to get bees in the hive box.

  • Buy a package of bees and add five more frames as needed.
  • Buy a Nuc of bees (nucleus colony) which includes the five frames of established bees.
  • Have a swarm fly over and hope they choose it as their home and you add five frames when needed.
  • Harvest them from a hive somewhere and put them in yourself having captured the queen.

A package of bees from a bee farm has been explained to me as someone throwing bees in together with an unknown queen that has been mated and hoping for the best. This may be an option for one hive but to me, it sounds rather risky, I may be wrong. The Queen cannot survive on her own but for the package, she will be in a separate container with a type of sugared plug and some nursing bees which are young worker bees, to tend to her. The package will also contain some sort of sugar syrup for the bee’s trip.

A Nuc of bees is a small-sized hive of already established bees with their queen that have all been stored in a temporary box with five removable frames. You place these frames inside your brooder box’s empty slots and the bees move to the new hive to follow the queen. The queen already lives in her hive and will be somewhere in the Nuc.

It would be great if the bees would just swarm overhead, spot your hive, and move there, but unless I had a nest of honeybees already swarming on my property in a tree or something, I wouldn’t hold my breath. And the idea of going to someone to harvest their bees from an infestation or swarming in their trees and somehow capturing their queen, scooping the bees into our box, and then driving them to our house sounds crazy. Honestly, I’ve watched this retrieval process on YouTube where they use vacuums and have all the equipment, it’s just not going to happen! And we have only ever seen one or two honey bees on our flowers.

I am personally scared of being stung. I mow the grass while George weedeats and I am not even sure how close I’d want to mow near them, let alone capture them. I’ve been stung a few times and it hurts! So while I am all for George having a hive, I had no idea it would be to this extent!

But he is excited, He has joined the bee club, paid for their bee-keeping class, and already placed an order with someone from the club for two Nucs this spring! We have walked around the yard and found a place where the grass doesn’t grow well and think this might be the place to put the hives but we will see what he learns. So I will keep you posted.

Take care of yourself and be kind to others.

Categories: Farm

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