For me, spring is just not spring unless I can hear the hum of bees in the yard. Last fall I had moved my bees from my house to other yards in Hampden and Carmel, and it’s been driving me nuts not having any here. Well, last week I made up for it with the arrival of 70 nucleus colonies and 250 packages of bees!
Bee package pick-up day is always a challenge and a thrill at the same time. Over 100 eager beekeepers arrived through the day all excited to pick up their new girls. Many were longtime customers, but those with the biggest nervous grins on their faces were my “newbees,” students who took one of my adult education beekeeping for beginners classes this spring, and were starting their first hives.
Over the last month or two, they have been coming to my store to pick up their equipment; bottom boards, supers, frames, foundation, feeders and covers. They have been building them, painting them and setting them out in that special place in the yard they had selected. Then on bee pick-up day they finally get to become beekeepers themselves.
All the bees in this shipment have gone to their new homes, and the nucs have now been re-housed and many moved to my other bee yards. The fun is set to be repeated this week with the arrival of my second shipment of 200 packages.
All these new colonies will need to be fed sugar syrup in the first month or two to help them build comb as quickly as possible. The queen bee will be laying more and more eggs as the colony grows, reaching a peak of almost 3000 eggs per day, more than her own weight in eggs! The hives will grow quickly and require more supers for expansion. Most will provide their new owners with a super full (about 25-35 pounds) of honey to harvest by the fall.
As well as the 450 packages of bees I will have distributed this spring, I have been preparing and building up nucs, or nucleus colonies. These small startup hives require a lot of work. It’s a continuous process of feeding, adding extra room, and moving extra brood from strong hives to smaller ones. I will end up preparing between 140 and 160 nucs this spring and into the summer. Inevitably, some nucs grow faster than I expected, and I’ve had the occasional swarm already this spring.
One swarm very obligingly left one of my nucs on the morning I was giving one of my one day, beekeeping for beginners classes at my house. As well as the morning classroom lessons and opening up six hives in the afternoon, my students got a bonus demonstration of swarm collecting.
The swarm had landed on a tree branch about 12 feet off the ground. The tree was too small to lean a ladder against, so I taped a 5-gallon bucket to a wooden pole. Then I raised the bucket up to the bees from below so that the swarm was more or less inside it. One sharp thrust upwards hit the branch with a thump, and 95 percent of the bees were knocked off and into the bucket. I then quickly lowered the bucket and poured the bees into a nuc box with combs and foundation already for them. The bees quickly descended into the hive, and I just caught a glimpse of the queen doing likewise. Over the next hour or so, all the remaining bees in the tree joined their sisters in the nuc box. With a bit of time and feeding, that swarm will make a nice additional nuc.
Maybe one of those students in the class will get those girls.
Peter Cowin, aka The Bee Whisperer, is president of the Penobscot County Beekeepers Association. His activities include honey production, pollination services, beekeeping lessons, sales of bees and bee equipment, and the removal of feral bee hives from homes and other structures. Check out “The Bee Whisperer” on Facebook, email petercowin@tds.net or call 299-6948.