So I got my hive home on Sunday. I now have a bazillion bees in my care. I've had pets. Lots of different pets. Dogs, cats, lots of fish, a snake, I even have a tarantula. Now I have bees.

Ok, yeah, bees aren't really pets. They're not going to come when called. And I'm probably not going to sit outside sipping on a lemonade with a bee snuggled in my lap. They're pretty self sustaining, I just provided them with a home. But to keep a colony of bees, particularly a healthy colony, I have work to do.

First things first, when I got them home, Warren said to leave them alone for 4 hours. Let them fly in and out and orientate themselves to their new location. The only thing I did, besides stand there in awe watching them, is feed them. They don't know where their nectar sources are yet, so I had to supply something for them. What do you feed bees? Sugar syrup.

Similar to feeding hummingbirds, sugar & water is their thing. Hummingbird nectar is a 1:4 ratio, 1 part sugar to 4 parts water. Bees however will take syrup in ratios ranging from 1:1 to 5:1. There are different reasons why you would feed them higher ratios of sugar, but for standard feeding, 1:1 is good. Equal parts of sugar and water. In preparation for this, I bought 20 pounds of sugar to have on hand. I don't know how long that will last.

I mixed up 8 cups of sugar and 8 cups of water, which filled a gallon jug about 3/4 of the way. I also added the recommended dosage of something called "Brood Booster and Feeding Stimulant". It's a mix of essential oils and other things that entices the bees and helps keep the sugar syrup from developing mold. It also smells ah-mazing. Like a very light sweet floral lemonade. If I were a honey bee, I'd be all over that. I gave them a half quart of the syrup and it was already half gone in 3 hours. Yeah little honey bees, it does smell delicious!

On Monday, I decided they had had long enough to settle down so maybe I should open the hive and do my first inspection. I mean, I had just seen everything the day before, but now they're mine and I want to just get to it. I put on my beekeepers jacket which has the hat and veil attached, beekeeper gloves that are too big because gloves are always too big for me and lit my smoker.

Beekeepers use smokers to calm the bees. It does two things. It triggers their survival response forcing them to retreat into the hive, and it masks the attack pheromone which triggers the colony to attack the person who is so rudely opening their hive. It doesn't seem to matter much what kind of smoke it is, beekeepers will use pine needles, burlap, newspapers, etc to burn. I used pine needles because we have plenty and it smells good when burning.

I opened the hive and did my inaugural albeit novice and probably unnecessary inspection. Let's be real. I just wanted to look at them.

After very carefully pulling and looking at 3 or 4 frames, I found my queen. It's sometimes really hard to find the queen especially if she's not marked. Many beekeepers will mark their queen with a little dot of paint on her back so she is easier to find. Mine isn't marked. But I found her. Sadly I don't have a photo of her yet, but give me time. I inspected the brood and watched them a bit until they started getting annoyed with me, so I closed up the hive and let them be. I'll check them again in a week or so, if I can wait that long. In the meantime, I'm going to study up some more on hive inspections so I feel like I kinda know what I'm doing. But this whole thing is a learning experience and I learn by doing.

I might look like I know what I'm doing. That's because I'm just looking. I know how to look at things.

And now for some bee education! There are 3 kinds of bees in a honey bee colony, the queen, the workers and the drones.

The queen is bigger than all the other bees and she is the most important part of the hive. She is the heart of the colony and mother to all the other bees. Without a productive queen, a colony will not survive. She has a long abdomen so she can stick it down in the cells to lay an egg. Queen bees can lay as many as 2000 eggs a day! After 3 days, the eggs hatch into larvae. The larvae grow quickly eventually turning into a pupa and the cell is capped with wax. After about 21 days from egg laying, a fully formed adult worker bee chews its way through the wax cap and emerges.

The closed cells are capped brood cells with a developing pupa inside. In the middle of the pic, 3/4 down, you can see a pupa in the cell. The worker bees are in the process of capping it.

90% of the bees in a colony are the worker bees and they're all female. They're the ones you see flying around your flowers collecting nectar and pollen. But the first thing they'll do after emerging from their cell is housekeeping. They will clean their own cell and get it ready for queenie to lay a new egg. Then they move on to other tasks working in the hive, cleaning it, feeding larvae, tending to the queen, building wax comb, guarding the hive, foraging for nectar and pollen and of course, making honey. This is why the term busy bee is a thing!

The other 10% of the colony are male, the drones. They are fatter than worker bees and have larger eyes and no stinger. Their only job on this planet is to mate with queen bees. They don't clean the hive, they don't collect nectar, they don't collect pollen. They only leave to find a queen and mate with her. The male bees have it soooo easy. (Insert joke here.) But they die shortly after mating, so there's that.

Also, lets talk a little about honey. When can I harvest honey?? Honey is the bee's food, along with pollen. They eat it and feed it to the developing brood. When bees collect nectar, they aren't eating it. They collect it, bring it back to the hive, and deposit it into a cell. When the cell of nectar dries out to an acceptable water content of 18%, they cap the cell for future use. My bees are making honey, but right now, it's their food, not mine. I don't expect to be able to get honey for a year. Maybe next summer if I'm lucky and I can keep the colony strong and healthy. But I will only take surplus honey. It all depends on them and how healthy and productive they are. Also, they must have a good source of nectar. I will not be supplying sugar syrup if I hope to get honey. I want real honey made from nectar, not fake honey made from sugar syrup.

Right now, all I have is one brood box. Beekeepers do not take honey from the brood box. It's the main hive where the queen lives, eggs are laid and baby bees are growing and being cared for. And they need and use the honey stored there. I'll add another brood box to the top of this one soon. After the colony grows to take over part of the second box, and depending on the current season and availability of nectar, I'll decide when to add a "honey super".

A honey super is another box of frames for the worker bees to build on and make honey. In between the bottom two brood boxes and the honey super, I'll place a "queen excluder". It's kinda like a fence to keep the queen in the brood boxes. The spaces are big enough for worker bees to pass through, but too small for the larger queen to get through. It keeps her from laying eggs on the frames that I plan to harvest honey from.

You might be wondering what kind of honey will I get? How do I know what plant they're foraging? My honey will be a general "wildflower honey" because the nectar will come from a variety of flowers and blossoms. When you see a particular honey like Orange Blossom Honey or Clover Honey, the beekeeper has placed beehives in a field or orchard of that plant. The bees will forage what is closest and most accessible to them. That's how the beekeeper knows what kind of honey it is. Plus, after years of experience, I assume the beekeeper can taste or smell the honey and know exactly what kind it is.

One day, when my colony is ready, I will harvest my own wildflower honey. But that's a long way off. For now, I just want them to grow and fly and find flowers and raise babies and do all the honey bee things while I just watch and learn and enjoy. 🐝