Hiving some bees.

This weekend I got to help my friend Becky to start off a new bee hive. This is one of the most satisfying jobs in beekeeping. You have a queen all packaged up in a little container about the size of your thumb and a few pounds of bees ready to join her in the hive. You place the queen in her container in the hive (she can’t get out until the worker bees eat the sugar plug at the end of the container to free her from confinement) and then you get to pour the bees into the hive on top of her. At this point since they haven’t really bonded with the queen or the hive the bees are not at all threatened and are quite benign. The act of pouring in all these bees is just very satisfying.


The idea is that by the time that the other bees eat away the sugar plug to the queen container they will have bonded with the queen and they will join together and build up the hive. If things don’t go to plan – perhaps the queen gets out too early before she is bonded with the others – then the other bees kill her. Nature is cruel sometimes.