The new package of bees arrived today. I purchased it from the Guilford County Beekeepers Association. I think they got the packages from Georgia. I'm not thrilled about that. I have developed a belief in local bees. But, I decided to take what I could get.
I am putting the bees in Clarence's yard again. The one thing Doug Shaw suggested was inserting the queen cage into the hive in a different way that he had read about recently. We parepared the cage the same way you normally do by taking out the cork and poking a hole into the candy. What we did differently this time was to attach a bamboo shaft to the side of the cage. We wired it on. I guess a rubber band would have worked as well.
Then we put the cage at the bottom of the brood box. The idea will be that we won't have to open the hive by taking off the super to check the release of the queen and pull out the queen cage. We can just pull the bamboo stick out to do that.
The other thing we did was to reloacte the hive a bit. It used to be in the shade a bit more than I liked. So we moved it into the sun and angled it to the south east.
By the time we left, the bees had already oriented and were starting to go after Clarence's holly bushes that have just come into bloom. The good thing about this installation is that there was already pollen in the hive and all the frames were fully built out so no new wax need be created. They can just start storing nectar and making honey.
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