Saturday, April 2, 2011

Professional Bees arrive May 29, 2010

Tim and Dean are professional bee-keepers. Dean has hundreds of hives in California and is working with Tim here in Colorado as well. Tim is helping me learn to be a bee-keeper, so he brought 3 hives of his own up to our place. As he takes care of his bees, I'll be able to learn from him. What a great thing for me! They brought their "professional bees" to join my two hives of country bees.
The novice bee-keeper made a mistake---I put both supers on my new hives. Tim said I needed to take the top boxes off so that my bees could start making their hives in a single super. We took the top off and looked to see where the bees were.
The queen was in the top hive. We moved her to the bottom hive so that she would be in the right place.


Then all the other bees were shaken out of the top super and into the bottom one.


Dean started checking the hives they brought up the hill. He used the smoker to check them (they'd just been driven by truck to a new location), feed them sugar water and pollen patties, and then sealed them back up.
They have big feeders inside their hives, different from my little quart jars on the outside of the hive.
On the left is a pollen patty. They laid these pollen patties between the supers on the their double hives. On the right is a mite pad.
Here is my hive with only one super--and the sugar water jar on the outside. Tim also pulled some grass and shoved a wad of grass in the entrance. This acted as an "entrance reducer" for the bees.

Now we are set up like we should be! One super, feeders filled and bees in their home.

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