Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Package Bees Arrive. 4.23.14

Two Packages of Bees
Today the packaged bees arrived.  Italian honeybees.  I installed them in the two beehives.  To each colony, I provided a quart of 1:1 cane sugar:water, and a patty of pollen substitute from Ruhl Bee Supply in Gladstone.

Now it's time to leave them alone, except checking on the queen in a few days and checking on the food supply.

At the bee supply store they had large packets of bee flower seeds.  From those, I think I'm on the right track.  Borage, Phaselia, and others.  I picked up a packet of Limnanthes douglasii.  Give it a try.  Yesterday at Lowes for deer fencing, I picked up a couple of Veronica plants in bloom, also for the honeybees.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:50 PM

    Our Queens are free! Our Queens are free! The cages were empty, and hopefully, the queens are safe within the confines of the hives ...

    If you haven't guessed, it's your Ridgefield neighbor here! Picked up our bees the very same day you did, and only this morning, removed the queen cages. What an experience! The greatest challenge, believe it or not, was getting the bars back in place with a minimum of squishing. The girls were clogging the gaps and wouldn't get out of the way! We tried to be so careful, but this is a clearly a technique that's going to require some mastery.

    How did your queens do?

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  2. I'm guessing yours must have also come from Ruhl Bee?

    I tried opening to remove queen cages but they were all gathered together in a ball. I think it's too cold in my yard. I will try again later. But they look OK.

    Glad you got your start! It's a great hobby!

    It's hard getting the bars in place without squishing some bees. I have tried to learn to jiggle them down, use a bee brush, and use a narrow strip of wood. The narrow strip of wood seems pretty helpful.

    It's all a learning process. Glad you are learning!

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