At 6:00 am this Monday Morning, I received a phone call from my local post office. "Ben Temple this is Donna and I just wanted to tell you that your bees are in and..." before she could finish I said half still asleep I will be right there. Now last week I stuck a deal with mom in which I agreed I would have a "real" beesuit instead of my homemade version I wanted to do. I had to rush order it to get here in time last week, except it did not come last week or Saturday like it was supposed too. It was also going to rain this morning, it's not advised to put bees in hive while it rains. Not too mention I had ordered a smoker w/ my beesuit and I needed that to smoke out the ants that had invaded my bottom board of my beehive ( I got most of the ants out with honey, ahhh the irony :) - thats a different story for different day ). Needless to say, I had a couple of problems on my hands this morning and I thought the bees would come on tuesday or wednesday. I had to get my bees though, as I was driving into town praying to God to bless my bees amongst other things, I was HAPPY. I haven't been this excited about something in a long time. The preparation, the research, the hard labor, so much as went into this day, this moment that was coming, the moment of holding these bees. I remember when I was still in California, I vividly remember ordering these bees. A myriad of thoughts ran through my brain...
I got to the Post Office. I knocked, hollered, and peeked through the crack. No one was there. Knocked again. I remained calm, I know they would come. I finally saw them and knocked and shouted again. They said, "just a minute." It seemed as forever...patiently I waited. The lady goes, "oh, and this box came to for you so I grabbed it for you." Perfect, that's my beesuit! Then she gave me the bees. Of course, as all men do I tried to carry both boxes at once to the car still in my flip-flops still waking up. I thought to myself as I braced the bee box up to my chin walking to my car, this would not bee good if I dropped this box. Made it home, sprayed some of the bees with sugar water as many had died on the journey. Put them in storage while it rained.
I was very unprepared for the main deal. The main deal is I have to stick my hand in the bee box pull out the queen box, release the cork(ever so carefully), put the queen into bee hive safely, dump the rest of bees into box, shut the door. Sounds simple, it's not. First of all, my beesuit barely fits, but it fits. It's difficult to see with the veil on. Luckily for me, my father had all the odds and ins all ready to go. The corkscrew to pull the cork, the sprayer to spray bees, the sugar water already made, pliers to pull can out with, rubber band to hold queen cage in place, and he even built an entrance reducer. So we got ready to put 10,000 bees ( now about 300-500 less) and one Italian Queen into their future home.
We opened the lid not knowing what to expect, dad said, just rip it open as it would be sealed by the can - which I think is normally actually correct. However, I opened it slowly and took a peep and sure enough one bee popped out and started crawling around. Named him Charlie. Nevertheless, we had a situation on our hands. What had went wrong here? Why were the bees able to get out? And if I opened this lid all the way were all my bees going to fly out? I had no choice. I had to get the Queen. I opened it and the feeder can was still in place along with the Queen cage. Only about 100 bees were roaming around. No big deal, Whew! Ok, so next I pulled to Queen cage out did not drop it bonus points for me! Checked her out and officially named her Queen Ortensia upon first site. You may remember the poll I had up earlier, Ortensia is Italian for "the garden lover". I like this name, and apparently so do some other people and I intended on making a garden area down around the BeeMax area. Now, when we pulled her out many bees did escape and we had to cover that up pretty quickly. I wish I could have taken a close up picture, Queen Ortensia is very pale, reddish in tint, but more like clear reddish/brown. She looks very different than the other bees. I gave her to my father to look at and before you know it my father had rubber banded her to the frame and stuck her in. I asked to have Queen Ortensia back in order to remove the cork (the main thing you have to do) in order for her to get out at a later time. We then put her back into the hive attached to a frame. Next, took off the piece of wood blocking hole and pulled out the feeder jar and dumped the bees one or two times into beehive. As instructed before, the bees did not like that and they got a little fussy. Then, set the box in the beehive so rest of bees will be able to fly out into their new home! I will come back in a day or two to remove this box and replace with the rest of the frames. For now, the bees seem to be liking and adjusting to their new home just fine.
I will post pictures later this week of event and maybe even some video.
All in all, it went pretty well. Glory be to God for always providing everything we need at the right time.
Wow..I've never known a bee keeper. Can't wait to see this in person.
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