Cultivating and bees

Note:  if you are in the pacific northwest, and want to keep bees, THIS IS THE TIME TO DO IT.  You have the month of april to get your hive started, and there's plenty of places selling packages that are local.  Check the farm and garden section of craislist in your area or your local bee store.  Beez Kneez in Snohomish is a good one.

tilling between the rows of berries

 This is where a straight row really pays off.  The rototiller fits exactly between the rows, so tilling up the area between the plants is pretty easy.  I put down a bunch of compost prior to the tilling, so it's mixed in between the rows.  This row is the berry row; marion berries and raspberries.  Several varieties; this year I'll take a look at how they are doing and cull the non-performing plants in favor of the cultivars that do well.  With marion berries and raspberries that's pretty easy - take parts of the plants that work and just move them down the row.  Marion berries will grow roots if you bury the tip of the vine in the soil.  Raspberries can be propogated by digging up a bit of the growing plant.

a 3lb package of bees with queen

 The packages of bees arrived today, so I went and picked them up.  I set up a new package in a deep super, which is the bottom box in a bee hive.  The new bees will chew their queen out of her cage (she's held in by a marshmellow) and spend the next day or to scrubbing their hive and making it their own - they will patch any holes in the hive, start producing wax to build out comb and generally get the hive ready for business.  After they concentrate on that box for a couple of days I'll add a second box to give them more space.

Watching the stragglers putting themselves in the hive

The metal circle in the top picture of a package of bees is a can with sweet food for the bees.  Sometimes it's sugar, sometimes corn syrup, they feed off that while they're being shipped.  The queen is kept in a very small cage that is attached to the package next to the feed can.

So the process of "hiving" a package is to set the hive up with its frames, then take the center 3 frames out.  You rap the package on a hard surface to knock all of the bees to the bottom, and then carefully pull out the feed can.  That allows you to access the queen cage, and you pull that out and then replace the can to keep the rest of the bees in the container.

The queen cage is capped with a small cork.  Making sure not to let the queen out you replace the cork with a marshmellow, and then place the queen at the bottom of the hive.  Then back to the pack, another sharp rap, and then you pull the feed can and dump the 10-15,000 bees into the space left by the three frames.  You'll have to shake it a bunch of times to get most of the bees out, and then  you carefully, and gently, replace the frames.  I use a hive inner lid, which is shown, and it has an oval hole it in.  I'll gently place that on top of the hive and then let the straggler bees find the hive and enter it via the hole.  Around sunset they are all in there, and I slip the lid on and that's it.

I don't wear protective gear doing this; the bees are usually pretty mellow, but I do use a little smoke.  No gloves, no veil. just calm, purposeful movement.  I think I'm getting less sensitive to stings; i did get stung once - i accidentally smashed a bee while lifting the hive, but that happens sometimes.

I like to listen after dark to the new hive.  What I like to hear is the chewing sound of the bees doing their housekeeping.  it's pretty subtle, but it shows that they are customizing their new home.

I restrict the entrance to the hive to a single 1/2" notch.  This allows the bees to keep raiding bees from other colonies out; a couple of guard bees can easily block the entrance, and this helps the hive concentrate on making their new home.