Bees & Pollinators

What’s All That Buzzing About???

Our bees have finally arrived!!!  We are so super excited!!!
The funny thing about the weekend is, I’ve been practicing leaving my phone in the bedroom so I can have some “unplugged” time…no calls or texts or randomness to worry about.  So, I did that this morning.  Then at about 11:20, while putting away laundry, I checked my phone (don’t ask me why, I just thought I should) and saw I had a couple of voicemails, so I decided to listen to them.  Lo and behold, it was Abe at the USPS calling to say I needed to pick up my bees before 11:00 or I would have to wait until Tuesday (tomorrow is Memorial Day after all).  SHIT!  So, I called him back and he didn’t answer…because he was leaving me another message on the other line saying he’d wait until 11:30…so I called him back again and Tool Lady went screeching out of the driveway to pick them up!  Luckily, we only live about 5 minutes form the Post Office!
YAY!!!  Bees!!!  And only 3 weeks late!  Stinkin’ drought!
This pic is a little fuzzy, but I couldn’t resist adding it!  SO MANY BEES!!!

 We took them outside, scraped some crystallized honey into the hive, cracked open the top of their little carrier, removed the syrup can they came with, removed the queen and shook out the bees.  It’s a pretty crazy experience to hold thousands of bees in your hands with all the buzzing they do!

We didn’t wear our protective gear this time since we’d read and heard that right now is the safest time to be around the hive because the bees have nothing to protect or fight for, so they’re pretty docile.  They were completely chill.  At one point I probably had about a hundred on the hand that was holding the Queen and they were very calm.

Then, we popped the cork on the Queens’ little cage so her workers can eat her out of her little prison and placed her in between two of the slats.

Tool Lady checking out the Queen
The little silver rectangle you see is the clip to the Queens cage 🙂
The remaining bees trying to figure out what the hell is going on!
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 Finally, we took a seat across the yard from them, had a beer, ate a few hotdogs, and watched as they all started to chill out, explore, and drink some water from the bucket (with hay floating on top so they don’t drown themselves) we put next to their new home…we figured since we were drinking, they should, too 😉

Now, all we can do is wait, hope they accept their Queen and our hive and be patient with the backward beekeeping process.  I figure in about 6 months to a year I’ll be able to post about our first harvesting of honey!!!

Cheers!!!

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