We are so excited to have you all back in our backyard for the beginning of our 3rd season! We are hoping the 2019 season will be the best yet! 

This year we are starting off with 4 hives!!! We aren’t messing around this year! We want our chances of some making it through the winter to be as high as possible, so we are upping our odds.

We started this season off as we have in the past, by getting our bees, bringing them home (see our video of Chris bringing 6 pounds of bees home)

Over the past week we’ve gotten a few questions about the process of actually getting the bees.  Unfortunately because we’ve lost all our hives previous to this, we’ve had to rely on buying nucs and packages to replenish our bee family. We will typically order in the mid winter from the apiaries we will purchase from. For this season, we bough packages from The Honey Exchange in Portland, Maine and we purchased our nucs from Backwoods Bees Bee Farm in Windham, Maine.

First, we picked up 2 3 pound (15,000 bee) packages of fully bred Russian bees. They come with no resources. They will be using the resources from the previous colony that did not make it. The fully bred Russian queen is kept separate from the rest of the bees as they need to accept her before she can join the colony.

Russians are new to the He Works Hard for the Honey family. We’ve typically had Italian or Carnolian bees (see our blogpost Beware: The Russians are Coming!!! for more info on each type of bee). They are a fair bit more hygienic with regard to pests, which makes them a little hardier a bee. Hopefully that means we won’t run into the same problems we’ve had over the past two seasons.

To get the bees in the hive, it’s as simple as opening the box, removing the queen and literally dumping the bees into the hive.  The bees can be calmed down during this process by spraying them down with sugar water. Sort of giving them a quick buzz so they are a little more docile during the transition.

Once the bees are mostly out of the box, we poke out the sugar plug that keeps the queen in the box. The time the queen is in the box with the 3 lbs of bees generally is enough time for them to accept her as their queen (not quite as long as the 8 seasons of Game of Thrones 😂).

We’ll have a few more blog posts to cover the other box and 2 nucs we got and how we integrate the queen into them.  Stay tuned!!

Chris, the boxing beekeeper