My wife and I have a small farm that we have been growing over the last 10 years. We have chickens, goats, sheep, dogs, and a pony. We have over 30 fruit trees, numerous berry bushes, and a garden area growing the typical vegatables.
Over the years I have noticed that some years I see bees in the fruit trees and there is normally more fruit during those years. When I don't see the bees are trees don't produce as much. So the fact that bees help achieve a larger crop and my love for honey, I decided we would try to add a beehive this year.
So I purchase a hive and my wife and I painted it camo to blend in more then the typical bright white hives, we are used to seeing. Below is a photo of the finished hive after painting it using leaves and branches as stencils for the spray paint.
So the next thing was to order a package of bees and pick what date we wanted them to arrive. The package of bees shipped to our house was about $200 and had about 10,000 bees and a queen. Being new to beekeeping I read a few books and realized how important the queen is. Normally without a queen laying eggs in the hive the bee colony will usually die out. The other thing with queen bees is that the colony will only accept one queen and kill off any others. When ordering a package of bees the queen is shipped in a cage inside the package of bees.
So it was the first week of April and the bees arrived. I was excited but also a little nervous that having limited knowledge I was most likely going to do something wrong and end up stung. I opened the package of bees and removed the cage the queen was in and found she was dead. "Long live the queen" well not in this case. I called the place I ordered the bees from and they were happy to send another queen right away.
Dead queen in her cage.
The place I ordered the bees from advised me to place all the bees into the hive and leave the dead queen in her cage inside the hive. I figured here was where I was going to get stung for the first time. I emptied the 10,000 or so bees into the hive and left the package the bees came in next to the hive since there were still a dozen or so bees that stayed in the package.
In the photo above you can see the white plastic package that the bees were shipped in, along side the hive. The yellow plastic things in front of the hive were water for the bees. I read that the bees need a lot of water so I made sure they had it. It was a little overkill one waterer is plenty, so I removed three of them over time. The metal can was full of syrup which fed the bees during shipping.
So now I had bees in the hive and no queen. I looked online and found a queen shipped to my door was $40, which was much cheaper then loosing $200 worth of bees. I figured I would buy an extra queen just in case I killed the next queen or she arrived dead again. The queen I had just ordered arrived the next day and I put her into the hive. Overnight the bees had already begun building the wax comb on the frames of the hive.
Two days later the replacement queen arrived and I set up a second hive. I took about 1,000 or so bees from my hive and placed them into the new hive with the new queen. I figured my chances were fairly good that I would at least have one hive survive.
The next week it got very cold at night and the hive that only had about 1,000 bees slowly began to die off day by day. The queen finally died and that ended that colony. My original hive seemed to remain busy and really took off. Toward the end of April the bees had filled all the frames in the hive with brood and honey. I believed it was time to add a second box onto the hive, which I did.
The hive on the left has two brood boxes and is doing great, the hive on the right is the dead hive. I am hoping that I have enough bees from the good hive to split into the empty hive soon.
The bees were something my wife was very scared of and if there were bees in our garden she would walk away. But once we had the bees for a while she began to enjoy them and frequently checks on the hive with me. She is still cautious around bees but not as scared as she once was. We enjoy watching the bees arrive at the hive with their bounty of pollen. I always thought pollen was yellow, but the bees arrive with all sort of colored pollens on their legs. Below is a couple pictures of the bees landing at the hive with some different colored pollens.
Sorry for the blury photo but trying to catch them flying into the hive with different colors was not as easy as I thought. But you get the idea of the the different colors.
Since we got the bees I have noticed the number of flowers on our fruit trees has increased. Some of those fruit trees have already begun growing fruit. Below is a picture of one of our apple trees with flowers and then as the fruit started to grow. I ended up having to cut some of the fruit away otherwise I think the weight of so much fruit would have broken branches.
So far I have been into the hive a half dozen times and have not been stung, but I am sure that will happen at some time. When I go into the hive I do wear a bee suit and use a smoker. The picture below is of the smoker I use and the other picture is the inside of the hive from the top.
So if anyone is thinking about beekeeping, I would suggest doing it. It is entertaining to watch your hive grow. I have seen a huge increase in flowers and growing fruit this year, way more then any previous year. The bees are also not as scary once you begin to work with them. The other benefit from beekeeping is of course HONEY.
Hope everyone has a great day.