Releasing the queen bee
Temp - 54 degrees, partly sunny (rain later).
On Saturday May 8 we installed our second beehive. Today, I’m working with the “queen cage”. When you get a new hive of bees, they come in a box, pictured below.
In the midst of that box is the queen bee, in the “queen cage”. She’s in there with several groomers. If you just dumped her in the box, the other bees would sting her to death. She’s got to be protected for several days until the bees get used to her.
Here we are installing the bees in the hive:
Process is as follows…first, you go out to the hive, and smoke the bees. That way they think there’s a fire, and they go into “work” mode, meaning they’ll be less likely to bother you. Bees communicate via pheromones, so the smoke means they’re not getting “defend” signals from the guard bees at the front of the hive. See the queen excluder in the center of the hive? This is the photo after we “shake” all the bees out of the box (we did that Saturday) and then let all the bees settle in to their new home. No photos of that, because there are usually a million bees flying around when you shake them, and it’s a good time to get stung if you’re not paying attention when one gets in your helmet (like one did to me that day).
Next (see top photo) you pull out the queen cage, and pull out the cork. For three days the queen’s been in the cage with her groomers, now there’s only a piece of candy between her and the rest of the hive. The bees will quickly eat away the candy, and then the queen will either bee accepted (likely) or killed (not as likely). We leave the hive for two weeks, then come out and check to see if there’s any brood, and also pull out some frames to see if we can find the queen.
And that’s how it works. :) In the photo below, you can see the new hive (on the right), and our other hive (on the left) that made it through the winter. On the left hive, the bottom box is a spacer - the next two boxes are “hive bodies” where the bees live through the winter, and the top two boxes are honey boxes full of honey frames, which is what we’ll harvest around the start of June.
