Here's a rundown on my bee installation adventures last weekend.  I won't go into any of the photography thoughts on this post, it'll just bee about the bees.  I'll follow it up with a separate post about the actual photography a bit later.

Note: I'll be using small images here.  If you want the full sized images, just click the image and view All Sizes in Flickr.  If you want the full blow-by-blow description of all 220 pictures, you can view the entire set directly here.

The Objective

The whole goal of this process is to get these...

Into this (the hive body)...

It seems like a fairly simple task until you consider that every one of those little critters has two native abilities that we humble hoomans do not... they can fly and they can sting. :-S

Prep Work

First, Rob preps the frames by spraying them with sugar and water (bee fewd).

Then our fearless warrior dons his armor and prepares to do battle.

Then, we go to work on the Box O' Bees...

...by first pulling out the queen bee and her attendants.

The queen's little prison gets tacked into place in the hive...

...and then we dump all the rest of them on top of her!

Time For Fewd!

The next part of the exercise is to get the bees down in the hive and load it all up with lots of food.  Rob started with the task of getting them all down in the hive itself (instead of on top of the frames)...

That wasn't working so well.  They were beeing quite uncooperative no matter how much we explained the process to them.  So, Rob decided to just dump the food in and let the bees figure out where they needed to go.

The bags are filled with sugar water, which is what the bees will slowly consume.  After getting the bags in place, a slit is made in the top of each bag to allow the bees access.

Building It Up

Once the food's taken care of, we still need to finish off the upper portion of the hive.  The first step in that process is to install the "super"...

...And that's followed up with the lids.  One internal (the "top cover")...

...and an external one ("telescoping cover") weighted down with bricks to stop it from blowing off if there's a storm or anything (a nasty one was on the way).

Miscellany

There were still a few miscellaneous minor tasks to complete, but that was pretty much all the hive work that needed to be done.  A number of bees are still out flying and crawling around and it took them a few hours to start working their way back into the hive...

A couple hours later we were down to this...

Of course, there were casualties in the process...

The Finale!

But, at the end of the day, we ended up with a relatively happy beekeeping family...

Thursday, April 19, 2007 8:04 AM