One nuc (short for nucleus) anyway. The other will hopefully be ready within the next week, depending on the weather and how the queen is laying.
The install went really well, all things considered. Of course, my bee brush has gone missing, and I had a bit of trouble keeping the smoker going. I’m going to need to practice on that one. So there were the inevitable snags. (Jules is taking the photos with the zoom lens.)
Above, I’m smoking the nuc’s front entrance slightly to settle the bees before moving them to the ground. The box sat on top of the hive overnight with an open entrance so the bees could orient and explore the area in the morning. Bees will actually recognize their own hive based on visual cues, so giving them time to associate with this new location is important.
Although I look a bit squeemish in the photo to the left, I’m actually searching for the queen and trying to get in the habit of holding the frame carefully. I’m hoping eventually to move to foundationless frames, which require more gentle handling than hives with an anchored installed foundation (i.e. the beeswax/ plastic sheet that establishes the pattern for the honeycomb, which you can see in leaning against the hive in the lower right corner of the photo below). I was able to find the queen on this frame before I inserted it into the hive.
All together, the nuc was 4 frames full of bees, brood, and honey. The idea behind a nuc is that it basically is the nucleus of an active hive, giving the new hive a leg up on a package of bees who will still need to build comb, lay eggs, etc. The downsides of nucs are that they are a bit more expensive, and they have a greater risk of bringing along infestations and diseases.
After installing all four frames and knowing the queen is already in the hive, I dumped the remaining bees into the hive much as one would install a package of bees. There were many, many bees, but I still have no sense of just how many. I imagine I’ll get better at estimating that over time.
Once everyone was either in the hive or at least out of the box, I installed the remaining frames on either side of the brood nest and used my hive tool to gently slide the frames together to preserve bee space, or the space which bees will respect and neither seal up because it’s too small nor build comb in because it’s too big. By this point, there were several bees flying around though none seemed particularly aggressive. Mostly they seemed curious, checking me out definitely, but not attacking.
Throughout the install, the bees had only the initial bit of smoke because I wasn’t going to stop in the middle to work on the smoker. I just concentrated on moving smoothly and slowly, being as gentle as possible with the bees. Jules had found a soft paintbrush for me that worked in a pinch, and I was able to use that to brush the bees out of the way as best I could so as to injure as few as possible. I will definitely need to find that bee brush or order a replacement! Here they are on the hive immediately after the install. While it looks like a lot, it’s really not.
I really liked my suit, and that definitely helped me to feel relaxed while working with the bees. The hood stood off my face nicely and wasn’t difficult to see through at all; having my hair up, though, was essential. I was able to use some Christmas money from my mother-in-law to purchase mine. Jules has already said she wants to order her own suit so she can come out with me, and Em and Sam are considering doing the same (G.W.’s spending incentives at work!). Sam kept telling me how proud he was of me because I was so brave to work with the bees. What a sweetie! Emily hung back a bit, armed with the binoculars so she wouldn’t miss anything and quite interested considering her fear of bees.
What I really want to get… but not until next year… is an observation hive. Maybe we’ll even get confident enough to try our hand at building our own top bar observation hive.
