BEE PIX's

This Queen comes in this cage, really neat.  You have to uncork the end with candy blocking it, insert into bee hive and then she eats from one side while the other bees eat from the outside in, whats that old song, "We meet in the middle..."  haha.  Once the candy is clear she can escape.  Good stuff.

Let me tell ya bout today.  Today's Goals:  Extract Queen cage to examine to insure that Queen Ortensia has escaped(if not have plan to encourage Queen to get out), Remove original bee box from hive and insert other frames in place.  In addition, put inner cover the bee hive.  Sounds easy right.  Well first we smoked the bees a little bit, opened the bee hive and grabbed the Queen frame out.  I was just simply holding the frame looking at it, when the weight of the comb and bees flopped out of position downward.  Round about the same time I noticed the Queen's candy appeared to still be not eaten completely.  Just great.  Now I got a situation... A few aggravated bees buzzing around didn't help.  I decided, to focus on the Queen cage.  I put the now bent frame back into hive and pulled the box out at same time.  Put cover back on and throughly examined the Queen's cage.  There were tons of bees on this cage I couldn't see anything and we had misplaced our bee brush we use to brush them off.  Finally, a breakthrough, I could see the candy was not eaten through entirely, but a path had been eaten and cleared.  Yes, my Queen had escaped into the hive.  Perfect, what a relief.  I was starting to think irrationally at the time so this was good news.  Now what to we do with bent frame?  I wanted to leave it and get out of there.  The main goals had been accomplished.  Dad pointed out what if that Queen works that frame first is on the frame?    Hmmm, yeah we should fix it now... So we did, not exactly easy to fix something when roughly 1000 little six-legged insects are crawling on it, thats 6000 legs, 2000 wings, and 1000 stingers you have to watch out for.  We were able to repair the frame the best we could.  We put the remaining frames in along with the repaired frame some comb on it already :) back into the hive.  Put the inner board(custom built by the way!) in the hive and walked away.  Mind you the mood of this procedure was tense, and there was an elevated level of concern at one point.  When the weight of the frame pulled it out, it was a strong jerk on those bees, they were cool though - but that could have been a bad situation.  I learned today, the you always hold frames vertically until you know for a fact the are complete and solid and eligible to be held horizontally.  Next check up for the bees will be in 2 weeks.  Will be observing if Queen Ortensia has been laying eggs.