Installation Day

And now we have two!

Queen cage #2 - for the life of me, I can’t see her in there (even though she’s supposedly marked with a little white dot!) She’s inside the cage - not on the outside - but does have a few helpers in with her to keep her company. (A queen always needs her attendants!)

Following up on my post from yesterday, I thought I’d provide some video support for augment my meager descriptions of our installation of the two bee packages we picked up on Easter Sunday.

As I believe I mentioned, we’ve been keeping an eye on the weather all week, hoping to give our new bees the best chance to succeed in their new homes. Inasmuch as bees don’t like wind, don’t like rain, nor do they enjoy temperatures below around 50 degrees (and that’s pushing it), we waited until yesterday (Thursday) to introduce them to their new hives.

In the meantime, they hung out in our cellar on top of our dryer for a few days.

Yesterday’s weather turned out to be balmy (and sunny!) and perfect for our task. And while nothing went terribly awry, we did run into a few snags. The first one was when I tried to remove the can of syrup from the first package. Usually the can is easily retrievable, and when you pull it out, you quickly cover the hole to keep the bees from flying out willy nilly, before you have a chance to dump them into the hive. Well…that turned out to be harder than I expected – and I know the bees got a lot more agitated than they would have ordinarily, had I not had to practically wrestle the can out of the package.

(Trying to remove the feeding can was almost comically ridiculous. The bees, however, were not amused.)

I don’t know if it was because they’d hung around in our cellar for a couple of days, but the bees this year (compared to our single hive last year) seemed to just be a lot more active and…agitated by the whole process. They also were apparently eager to get started ‘living their lives’ (they sound like teenagers) because both packages had started building wax comb inside their little wood and wire boxes, which surprised me.

(Removing the first queen cage from the package; I was surprised to find the bees had built comb on the outside of the queen cage.)

I will admit, my handling of them (especially when they wouldn’t come out of the package and drop into the hive easily) was, hmm, somewhat inelegant. And as far as spotting the queens? This year, I asked for ‘marked’ queens, in order to hopefully be able to spot them more easily when they’re in the hives. But for the life of me, it was hard for me to see them – even marked – and still in their cages. (I’m obviously awful at this.) Some of the difficulty was because the worker bees were just relentlessly walking all over the queen cages and no matter how many times I tried to sweep or blow them away, they kept blocking my view. But I think I may be a poor queen-spotter.

(Installing the queen cage into Hive 1, 9 April 2026)

(Installing Queen in Hive 2; Nice glove, huh? Last year this probably would’ve freaked me out.)

As I mentioned, the queens need to eat their way out of their cages. This process usually takes three to four days. After that, assuming the rest of the bees accept her as their queen (and don’t kill her), she should get busy laying eggs as soon as she gets out of her cage. That means, when I check on them in about a week’s time, I should, hopefully, see lots of eggs in the comb.

(Installing Bees in Hive 1, 9 April 2026)

In order to help these two packages get a head start on building up their numbers, I was able to at least use the frames covered with comb from the hive that died in March. Ordinarily, as was the case with our colony last year, those bees had to ‘start from scratch,’ as I dumped them into a hive with all empty frames. So those bees had to create wax comb first, before the queen could lay her eggs.

(Installing Bees in Hive 2, 9 April 2026)

Since I provided both hives with half empty frames and half frames covered with comb from last year, the whole process should move forward faster than it did last year.

We’ll see!

,

(Three hours post-installation, 9 April 2026. Still some clumps of hangers-on who don’t want to check into their new digs.Eventually, however, they all relented.)

I feel like both of these colonies are at least initially more active than last year’s hive. Then again, I’m pretty sure it rained a lot right after I installed last year’s hive. I can attest that both colonies were abuzz with activity today and seemed to relish the warm, sunny day. I think they felt reborn.

By this evening, both boxes in which the ‘packages’ arrived were empty. They’d all found their way into their hives – and all was well.

We’ll check on Sunday to make sure the queens made it out of their cages.