Package Bees arrive April 16

Saturday morning the weather was cool and damp with light rain and a temperature of 43 F.  I and my wife Ellen picked up 5 packages of Carniolian honeybees and headed home.  We had readied the hives the day before and supplied each of them with a gallon of 1:1 syrup with 1cc of thymol added to a 5 gallon batch of syrup.  The thymol was added as part of our mite control program and is something we had not used before because the varroa destructor had not been introduced when we kept bees in the past.  We are using our old Langstroth hives but modified them by adding screened bottom boards as another form of mite control.

When we arrived home with the bees the temperature was up to 49 F with a high of 50 F forecast for the day and cooler weather forecast for the week so it was as warm as it was likely to get.  We started with L3 a Langstroth hive.  I removed the syrup can from the package and Ellen removed the queen cage.  Ellen replaced the cork in the queen cage with a marshmallow and I hung the cage toward the rear of the hive and replaced the frames.  I knocked the bees down and poured them into the hive.  The bees were cool and not many were flying and they took a few minutes to settle into the hive.  I put the cover back on the hive and set the package down in front of the hive so the stragglers could make their way back to the cluster.

The next hive was T2 which is a top bar hive. We went through the same drill but the process was faster because there are no frames in a TBH so we just dumped in the bees and did not need to wait for them to settle into the hive before we put the lid on.  All 5 packages were installed with no problems.  3 in top bar hives and 2 in Langstroth hives.
Pictures of the hives have been posted at

https://picasaweb.google.com/miller.jrm/Bees

Bees

Today the high temperature was only 47 F and very few bees were flying.  Just a couple of bees at a time from L3 and a half a dozen in the air around T3.  No pollen was observed on the bees.  I will check that the queen has been released on Monday afternoon when it is warmest.

  Jack