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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Package Bees

To day I picked up 4 bee packages from a near by beekeeper. A bee package is a small screened box with 3 pounds of worker bees, a caged queen bee, and a tin can of sugar syrup so they can have something to eat on the trip up from the southern states. And is one of the ways to start new hives.
a package of bees is about 9000 bees
The four bee packages waiting to be in stalled in hives
Me taking the bees out to the apple orchard where I set up their new homes
Getting the bee smoker going
Shaking the bees out of the box and into their hive
This is one of the queen cages it is designed to slowly release the queen. It has a plug of fondant candy that the bees eat to let the queen out.

3 comments:

Sonja Langford said...

Very Cool! How much honey will 4 hives produce, do you know?

Blessings,
Addie

www.girlishmusings.blogspot.com

David said...

I'll have to wait and see at the end of the main honey flow which starts in july and ends in August in my area. In a good honey flow they could make 140 -160 pounds. Half or so of this is left on for the bees to eat through the long winter.
~David

Mrs. G said...

David,
We are former bee keepers (ours all died), someone else has the majority of the land on the farm where we live and he does not follow bee friendly practices. We used small cell foundation to regress the bees so that they are closer to wild bees and more disease resistant. I miss them! I never shook the bees into the hive though, I would worry about doing it that way, though I know most people do. It's nice that at least some of your hives survived. :-)

Mrs. G