New Hobby: Bee Keeping

[massphatness]

Time for an update.

The plan, when installing a package of bees, is

1 - Install the queen cage in the hive
2 - Dump the bees into the hive
3 - Wait three days then inspect to be be sure the queen has both successfully eaten her way out of her cage & has been accepted by the hive (ie. they didn't kill her on exit)
4 - Wait another week (Day 10) and inspect for bee eggs

Originally, I was supposed to take delivery of the bees on April 10. Due to weather in the South (tornadoes and what not), that got pushed to April 17 as I had discussed previously. The April 10 date would have been damn near perfect for me from a New England weather standpoint, a work schedule standpoint and a personal time standpoint. I could have followed the schedule above pretty precisely.

Having instead received the bees and installed them on Monday, I was unable to do a queen cage inspection until today because Grace & I went on a mini vacation. We were both very excited to see what had been going on with the hive while we were away, and we didn't even bring our luggage into the house when we got home. Instead, we donned our bee gear, fired up the smoker, and went off to inspect the hive hoping to find a live & productive queen.


Have your speakers on to hear my panic in this video:

Queen Cage Inspection