Hiving My Backyard Bees
Last year I wrote about beekeeping and startups. Over the winter I lost all my bees. The queen swarmed away and the remaining bees were unable to produce a new queen, so they all left eventually too.
Yesterday I bought a new $110 package of bees from one of my Georgia Tech professors who does a lot of beekeeping to start a new hive for this year. The package looks like this:
Hiving the bees is fairly straightforward. You simply open the box and shake the bees out into the hive. Of course you need to have the fancy and handsome hat and gloves to avoid getting stung!
The package comes with one queen bee who has been placed in a mini cage of her own. The purpose of this mini cage is to keep the queen trapped in the new hive so that she becomes accustomed to the new home. She is corked into her mini cage by a candy substance. Over the course of the next week, the other bees will eat through the candy cork and release her into the hive. By that time, she will be comfortable living in her new home.
Then put the lid back on and walk away! I’ll check back up on the hive 2-3 times this summer, adding new boxes as the hive grows. For the most part I’ll leave the hive alone until fall when I’ll harvest the honey. Yummy!
It’s sorta weird I know. You’re a weirdo, too, so stop laughing at me 🙂
If you want startup analogies, read my previous post!