The White Hive

I was in Portland last week for a dental convention, and on my way home Friday I picked up 3 pounds of Italian honeybees and 1 mated queen. I rushed home, so we could get them in their hive before dark. It's not the ideal time to play with bees, but they had been in this box for 3 days, and we wanted to set them free. Bees put off a lot of heat, in fact when I put my hand to the side of the box I could feel heat pouring off of them. I put them on the floor of my car with the AC on and listened to them to gauge their comfort. Calm and quiet when they are the right temperature, loud and frantic when they are too hot. Their comfortable was a bit chilly for me, but I toughed it out.


We loaded everything up into the Subaru.


Getting set up


We quickly slipped the queen out. She comes in a cage, and the bees keep her fed. She was rather unhappy in that cage and ran back and forth. Here's where we messed up. There are so many ways you can install packaged bees. The man at the bee supply store gave me a mini marshmallow and a thumb tack and told me to remove the cork from the queen cage, fill it with a marshmallow and tack her to the top of a frame. Well the tack bent almost immediately and we said to hell with it and put her on the bottom in her cage with the marshmallow plug (the bees eat through it and release her). You can release a queen on the bottom, but generally you don't leave her in her cage. I was paranoid that she would fly off, so I didn't want to just release her. But the bottom of the hive is an open screen and it got down to freezing that night. They are acting fine, but we will have to open them when the weather cooperates to make sure she is there and laying eggs and didn't get chilled and die. We opened the hive two days later and removed the queen cage, it was empty. That doesn't mean she lived...just that they got the cage open and either released her or disposed of her body. What we should have done is left her up higher where the bees would cluster around her and keep her warm.


It was hard getting that can out to release the bees. He gave the cage a solid thwap against the hive stand to get the bees to drop.


Then dumped everyone in.



He replaced the missing frames and we sealed them up. It was quite a mess of angry bees flying around at first, but within 10 minutes 99% of the bees were inside and settled. Some stayed in the box so Aaron dumped them on the grass and gave them a plank to walk up.


The next day we checked the top feeder to make sure they were eating. They weren't. We had planned on adding a few frames of honey from another hive the next day, but the weather forecast was off. I was worried they would starve with no honey, no sugar water and rainy weather. We decided to sneak some frames of honey in and check the queen cage, because we realized we had not done the right thing. It was at that point we found the empty cage and after we opened them (quickly - it's best not to disturb a new hive for at least a week) that they started feeding and going out to forage. They seem to be doing well now, but I'm anxious to see how they are doing and if there is a queen in there.