Adventures in Beekeeping

Imagine this....you are driving down the interstate in your Honda Element with at least 100 loose bees buzzing around the inside of the vehicle. Scary? Not really.

Yesterday I drove about an hour and a half to an apiary. After attending a seminar on Sustainable Beekeeping, we went out into his bee yard and loaded 5 nuclear hives into my car. Unfortunately, in closing up each hive...some of the bees were left on the outside of the nuc. And, of course, they followed their hive mates into my car. So, off I drove with the air conditioning on to keep them from overheating....as they buzzed around my head.

I decided that if I were to be pulled over for speeding, I was sure one look into my car would have convinced any officer to allow me to leave with just a warning!

Upon arriving home, I unloaded the girls (most of the bees in each hive are females) and started the task of installing each frame from each nuc into its appropriate hive.

Here is the nuc box next to the hive. I removed the screened lid from the nuc box and carefully lifted each frame into the new hive.

Here are all five frames installed into the new hive....notice the whiter new frames to the side of the older frames. The bees will have to make honeycomb on these new frames in order to fill them with brood and honey.

I will leave the empty nuc boxes by each hive for the night so that the remaining bees will find their way to their new home....by smell. They will find the hive that has the correct queen.