Our honeybees arrive!!

It’s been a while since the last post and a lot has happened. Our 2 nucs arrived Sunday, May 2, 2010. A “nuc” is short for “nucleus” as in “the nucleus of a new hive”. A nuc contains about 10,000-20,000 bees I’m guessing, thus representing a really good start to a hive which hopefully will contain 50,000+ honeybees when fully populated. We had to drive 30 miles each way to pick up our two nucs. Bringing tens of thousands of bees home in our Honda was a little scary at first, but things went smoothly. Not a single stray bee appeared in the car as we drove home. It rained like crazy that night so we couldn’t transfer our bees from their little bee hotels (the nuc boxes) to their new permanent hive home for 2 days. On Tuesday afternoon we donned our gear (veil and gloves) and opened the nuc boxes, revealing the little honeybees in all their proliferative splendor, hard at work tending the hive. Most of the frames in our nucs were abundantly filled with brood (bee larvae which will hatch into bees) and supporting honey and bee pollen. There are, I think, about 5 frames in each of our two nucs and we transferred them one by one to the hive boxes Bunny and I had spent so much time and attention building and preparing for this day. We constructed each hive box and each frame from a kit of precut wood. We nailed, glued, stapled, tacked, primed, painted and urethaned 8 or so hive boxes of various sizes, spending maybe 100 man hours. That investment of time and money (maybe $700 so far) made this day all the more meaningful. Our friends Sandra and John were on hand Tuesday to support us and to photograph our activities. We had to inspect each frame one by one. One of the things we're looking for on each frame is the single queen each hive has. We're not too good at finding her yet, she looks ALMOST exactly the same as the other 10,000 bees!!!! After less than an hour we were done. We never did find those two queens but we are going on faith that each hive has its queen intact. (In Bunny's and my world of beekeeping, faith now plays an important role ;-) The bees are now in their new hive homes. Bunny and I are providing the 2 new colonys all the support they need to create lots and lots of new bees. Now we wait and see how they adapt to their new surroundings. In a week or two, we'll take a peek inside our 2 hives to see how our bees are progressing on their colony-building mission. If you're wondering, we experienced not a single sting. Our bees are so happy and docile Bunny didn't even wear gloves on Tuesday as we handled them !