The Joys of Beekeeping

By Pat McGinty 

“Mommy, where do bees come from?” Well, technically, they have been credited for originating in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. However, the honeybees in my backyard came from what is called a package of bees.

 Every February new beekeepers and beekeepers who have lost colonies over the winter put in an order for new bees. This is usually done through local bee suppliers but can be done online from various catalog order vendors that supply not only bees but hives, frames, smokers, bee suits, etc., etc. Regardless of how they are ordered, the bees arrive in little screened boxes with a queen bee and a supply of food sometime in April. Mine arrived April 11, about a week before I had planned to be ready for them.  I had enough notice from my provider, Beemaniacs, that I switched into high gear (also known as panic) and started staining the new cedar boxes I had been making with my friend, Steve Peterson. Three trips to Steve’s shop and  a lot of intense prayer (please don’t let it rain; keep the sun shining) and the two hives were ready for “Package Day.”

Package Day is how beekeepers refer to pick up day. Steve and I headed over to Beemaniacs, southwest of Deer Park, along with about 100-plus other new or veteran beekeepers. To say the owners, Ari and Ana Alvarez and their two teenagers, were as busy as bees would be an understatement. There is a lot of energy in package day with new beekeepers buzzing about looking at and asking questions about all the bee accessories available (“Do you have a left-handed smoker?”). Also, there were short demonstrations being done showing the proper way to put your bees into their new home with the wind blowing hard and cold across the flatland. And when new and veteran beekeepers get together, it sounds like a flowering tree full of bees singing. It took about an hour to pick up our bees and a few accessories we didn’t have and then we were on our way to put bees into hives.

We started at Steve’s since he only had one package to “hive.” He also wanted to try something new this year, and I wanted to watch him so I knew what he had in mind.  As it turned out it was a pretty easy method once we got the can of food out of the box so we could get to the queen (hint – always carry an inch and a quarter drywall screw with you). For those of you who have never had bees, the queen comes in a small (half-by-half-by-inch-and-a-quarter) cage with a cork in the bottom. It is necessary to remove the queen cage first, remove the cork (sometimes it will come out whole and other times pieces of it will fall into the cage with the queen which can be bad), and replace it with a mini-marshmallow (you must do this very fast or you will be buying another queen.) The queen in her cage is then hung between frames from a bendable piece of metal at the top of the cage. The worker bees will help her to escape and set up the nursery. Next Steve took the screened box with the rest of the bees and rested it on one of its screened sides on top of the frames. With the can of food removed from the box there is a large hole for the bees to move through into their new home. The can of food (actually a sugar-syrup concoction) was placed atop two short (approximately 4 inch) pieces of square molding so the bees could continue to get nourishment until there would be food available from Mother Nature. This process was repeated at my two hives and three packages of bees started adjusting to their new environment. I found this method to be far nicer to the bees than the way I had been taught, which was to (after the queen was removed and placed between the frames) bang the box on the top of the hive and shake all the bees out of the box into the hive.  Do this until most of the bees were out of the box and then put the box on the ground in front of the hive. Those bees will most likely freeze to death overnight but a few might be smart enough to find the hive opening and get in where it is warm (bees keep their hive at about 95 degrees.)  If I was a bee treated this way I would be very cranky (and they usually were.)
 
Now it would be nice if that was all there was to it, but package day is just the beginning.  In one or two days the beekeeper is back in the hive checking to see if the all the workers have moved out of temporary housing into their (hopefully) permanent home (occasionally a package of bees has left the hive and swarmed; no, I don’t know why and neither does anyone else I have asked.) It is also follow-up time to be sure the queen has escaped her cage and is busy in the nursery laying eggs to build the bee population of her hive (one of my queens was trapped with about five worker bees because a small piece of the cork was stuck in the cage when the marshmallow was inserted. It was a very good thing I checked.) If that is all good, then the bees have to be fed sugar syrup (or frames of honey if a veteran beekeeper has set some aside) until the flowers start popping and pollen and nectar can be gathered to feed the workers, drones, and new baby bees. This is usually mid to late May but appears to be a little earlier this year. Another reason to keep food in the hive is wet weather.  Bees do not like to be wet and will not fly in rainy weather no matter how good the nectar and pollen. A supply of sugar syrup can make the difference between a strong hive and a weak hive until drier weather comes along.

 So now the beekeeper checks the hives once or so a week until extra food is no longer needed. Then the hive check is every two weeks or so until the nectar is really flowing and supers (boxes that beekeepers collect the honey they keep for themselves) are piling up. This usually takes place mid-June to late August or even early September.  During that time it is important to observe the bees regularly because there are ways to tell if everything is OK or some kind of intervention is needed; but more about that another time.

 Finally, the Backyard Beekeepers had their first meeting Wednesday, April 22, at Bug-n-Out in Deer Park. About 25 beekeepers from 10 years old to much more mature agreed to formally organize for the purpose of learning, sharing, and generally becoming better beekeepers. The next meeting is set for Thursday, May 21, at 6:30 pm at Bug-n-Out in Deer Park (108 E Crawford St.). There will be a short organizational meeting followed by a PowerPoint presentation on beekeeping by local veteran beekeeper Bob Arnold. Please join us. (If you have a portable chair you can bring, it would help out tremendously.) I look forward to seeing you there.