This spring I started two bee hives. It's challenging and sometimes unnerving but I love it. I have a lot to learn but the bees fascinate me. They're pretty self sufficient so my job is to help them a little when they need it and mostly stay out of their way. The picture above is of one of the bees pollinating my pickle vines. This is a shot of one of my hives during a check-up.
I set the hives up in a horse run-in shed at the very back of the property. The winds are incredibly strong in the winter and I didn't want them to have to exhaust themselves to stay warm when the cold comes. It should provide them with a nice little wind break and it keeps people from seeing them. You'd never know they were there!
Painting the hives was easy compared to introducing the bees to their new homes. It's described as a "relatively simple" process and by the time I got my bees I'd watched a ton of videos of beekeepers which did not keep my efforts from ending in tears. It was all because of the damned mini-marshmallows. You see- mini-marshmallows are the lynchpin to starting a new hive. Who knew right?
5 Things you need to start a beehive- listed in order of importance:
1) Balls (figuratively speaking)
2) Bee suit
3) A small screw or nail
4) Mini marshmallows
5) Sugar syrup in a spray bottle
To start a hive you have to buy packages of bees from a beekeeper. The bees are in a small wooden and mesh box. Each of the boxes below are filled with 5,000-7,000 bees. This picture is from my bee dealer's shop about an hour away in the middle of absolute nowhere. I was lucky to get bees this year, they've been sold out for the past two years- beekeeping is the new black apparently.
The bees in the box buzz around the queen who is suspended in her own mini wooden box hanging in the center of the larger container by a plastic string. Here's my bee dealer's collection of queens waiting to be hung in their boxes. Each little box is about 2inches long by 1 inch wide and has one queen inside. There's a tiny hole at the bottom of the little box plugged by a teeny piece of cork. THAT's why the mini marshmallow is crucial. When the time comes, my job is to QUICKLY pop out the mini cork when the queen isn't looking and replace it with a mini marshmallow that the other bees will eat away to get her out.
Here's a close up of the bee boxes I got. The bees are usually hungry and pissy from being stuck in a box and manhandled so the first order of business after loading them in the car was to spray the mesh with sugar syrup- half water/half sugar that I'd put in a spray bottle just for them. They love it. You mist them and immediately all buzzing stops because they're too busy licking it off themselves. It's pretty cool, like throwing money in a club but not.
The bees close up after a misting of sugar water.
An important part of beekeeping is knowing when to mess with the bees. You shouldn't bother the hives unless it's sunny and between 10am and 2pm, that's a general rule because if it's cloudy or raining or close to wake up or bed time all the bees are home when you come knocking - it's better for the majority of them to be out and about. That logic sounds good to me so I stick to it. The only time that rule doesn't apply is when you're starting a hive, that should happen closer to sundown so the bees don't fly away looking to gathering pollen and nectar. They need to want to get ready for bed.
Here's a video of a pro in action so you can see how things were supposed to go, the action really starts around the 2min mark and the marshmallow explanation is at 5:50-
SO- back to my story- it's an hour until sundown, I've got all 5 of the things you need to start a beehive and I'm ready to roll. I haul all my stuff down to the run-in shed and open the top of the first bee box exposing the syrup can, UNLIKE the uber ballsy man in the video I did not smack my bee box really hard, mine was more of a tap, perhaps that was my first mistake.
When I pulled the syrup can out my bees started flying all over. Then....the plastic strap broke and the queen's mini box fell into the mound of bees below. I had to stick my hand in the mound and try not to squish bees to get her out. It was horrible because my main goal is to be quick but not kill any bees which is nearly impossible.
Fifteen minutes in and I'm in a full sweat in a bee suit which is like being a character at Disney. This is the kind of suit I wear. If a bead of sweat is tickling your eyebrow there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Nothing.
After making it through the Temple of Doom test I still had to make the mini marshmallow swap. I reached for the bag of mini puffs of sugar and felt a cold chill....I'd forgotten the damned mini marshmallows. I left them in the house. Please note in the picture near the top how very far away the bee shed is from the house. Now imagine running it as fast as you can in a bee suit. That's what Louis did as I stood calmly being covered in bees as I held their queen, their one reason for living. Louis had come to watch me and take video which he started to do but when the queen fell there was a decent amount of cursing so it wasn't salvageable.
Here's what mini marshmallows look like:
Here's what big marshmallows look like:
One of these will work as a temporary cork in a teeny queen box and one won't. Which do you think Louis brought me? That's right, the giant ones. By now the sun was setting, I'm covered in pissed off bees staring at a sweaty Louis holding a bag of giant marshmallows and I still have one hive to go. FML.
I ended all communication with Louis and ripped off a small piece of a big marshmallow to try and use in the nail/cork/marshmallow swap. It stuck to my gloves and wouldn't stay in the hole, kept ripping out because it's a sticky bit of a big marshmallow and not a mini one. By now I'm sweating and shaking and starting to freak out like I hadn't since my first prom when I tore my hairdo out 20minutes before my date showed up. I can be really fun sometimes. I rubbed my glove on dirt to stop the sticking issue and finally it stuck in the queen box instead of on me. Louis was still mumbling that the mini marshmallow bag was NOT in the pantry as I heard mostly ringing and my heartbeat as I powered through starting the second hive.
The second hive went much better but still not as it should have. I wasn't calm, I wasn't connected to nature and at ease like I hope to one day be when I handle the bees. I was on shaky auto-pilot that, after robotically walking into the house, into the pantry and tossing the goddamn bag of mini-marshmallows at Louis ended up in a weepy shower.
Thankfully that was my hardest task of the year since you don't harvest honey until the second season. One good thing about a really rocky start is that everything I've done for them since then has seemed pretty easy. Let's hope it stays that way!
Here's another picture of their queendoms when I was setting them up to be level.
