Since this is our first time having honeybees we’ve done a ton of reading, and have been following the instructions we were given with the bee kits as closely as possible. However, Mother Nature had another plan this week. Ideally we were only suppose to leave the bee kits in the hive for seven to nine days to make sure the queen bonds with her hive.

However, it’s been raining quite a bit the last week or so, and the temperatures have been on the cold side. I say this because in order to get the bee kits out you have to open the hive and you don’t want to do that when it’s cold or rainy. The hive likes to stay between 93° and 96°F with very little moisture, so we waited, and waited.

And finally, on Tuesday night the time was right to remove the bee kits and replace them with five frames. First we removed the queens cage. This is the cage that the Queen was sent to us in. There is a hole in the bottom of the cage that gets corked with a marshmallow and over the last 12 days she’s eaten her way out of the cage and bonded with her hive.

Next the feeder was removed and The Renaissance Man started smoking the hive to keep the bees calm while we moved things all around.

The bee kit, which is what the bees and the Queen came to us in, can be see on the left side of the hive. The bees had mostly left the comfort of the bee kit and had started to move into the frames on the right side of the bee box and have started building comb.

The two darker brown spots on the top of the bee kit are the pollen patties. As I mentioned before, we have to feed the bees both sugar water (carbs) and pollen patties (protein) until enough things start blooming that they can find food on their own.

Unfortunately we has a few pieces of vertical comb being built in both hives. This could partially be attributed to the fact that we had to leave the kits in a few extra days due to our bad weather. At any rate, these vertical combs had to be removed since you want the bees to build horizontally off of the frames. The comb is pretty neat to look at though.

And here is what the bee kit looks like outside of the hive without too many bees left.

The Renaissance Man then did his best job to remove all of the extra comb that was built on the bee kits. One kit in particular already had signs that the queen had been laying brood (babies). The black dots in the comb is pollen Thankfully, the worker bees didn’t build too much comb on the bee kit since we had to scrape it all off to give back to Ruhl Bee Supply.

The five remaining frames were inserted back into the hive and now we wait. If all goes well over the next several weeks, we will add another brood box onto the hive as the bees begin to reproduce and multiply.

We’ll continue to monitor and feed the bees until the blackberries bloom, and then they should have enough nectar and pollen to carry on all summer. I’ll be sure to do a bee update from time to time to keep everyone posted on their progress!