Installation of the Nucs

So today I made the trip to pickup the bee's, I must say I didn't expect to be as excited as I was.  It reminded me of being a kid on Christmas.  I may have been a tad over excited but I've been looking forward to this for such a long time.  It was so worth the wait and I'm glad they are finally got them, even if the day took longer than I really wanted.  I left at 7am and got home around 6pm a bit longer drive than I would have liked but I was also fully distracted when we arrived at Mark's and he has 40+ hives and was more than happy to share some experience that wasn't just read from a book or observed from YouTube.

He has a very nice setup at his house, a pond surrounded by his mass of hives in the middle of some decent timber and farm land.  It sucked that I managed to drive 4 hours and realized that I didn't have my camera and my phone battery was running low enough I couldn't get any shots of it.  Meeting Mark was very helpful and I wish he was closer as he would be an excellent bee mentor. 

After we enjoyed some of his homemade blackberry wine, and a specific type of honey I wish I would have caught the name it was incredibly good with a fruity blossom taste.  I ended up buying 4 lbs of it along with 4 lbs of his general honey (clover/alfalfa most likely).  Some will get turned into mead but for the most part I think it'll go on my toast and in my bread.  After that bit of fun we finally got to check out the nuc's and hives.  I think we looked at 5 different nuc's and he picked out one of the average nuc's with a decent brood pattern and a nice laying carnoilian.  The nuc was incredibly calm and easy to work with we could have handled that one without a suit or gloves and he did.  I fully suited up as I'd like my start with beekeeping to be less painful I know it'll happen eventually but minimizing the stings for my beginnings are for the best.  The second nuc he decided on was incredible so loaded with brood and nurse bee's they looked like they were could easily swarm (I could be way wrong on that) but they were packed in there so tight and the nuc was completely full of brood, with 1 frame full of capped brood and the rest of the frames full of brood in various stages one frame with eggs.  That one took a suit and gloves to handle they were a bit testy hopefully they settle down once they're in their permanent home.

We got the car started and cooled and loaded up the nuc's and started the drive home.  It was mostly pleasant we had 4 escapee's but no one decided they needed to sting which was good.  Two road in the back window and unfortunately didn't survive the four hour trip home and 2 decided to help me navigate on the dash.  I thought they had died to but I think the AC just slowed them down because when I got home and opened the windows they decided to fly off.

I went to install the bee's and noticed that my hives were a bit lopsided so I got the level out and noticed they were out of whack.  I repositioned the stepping stones I was using to lift the hives off the ground and got them leveled up with a slight incline to keep rain out of the hive.  Then I filled the feeders so my new bee's would have something to draw out the foundation.

I grabbed a nuc to put in and they still looked mostly happy.

I wanted to get more pictures of the frames and try finding the queen but, we have a sudden storm rolling in so I figured it was best to just get everyone moved over to their new home.  I gently moved the frames over to their hives but I'm not sure I got my spacing right.  The feeder takes up just a bit more space than a frame and a half.  Hopefully my coworker will be able to check them tomorrow afternoon and let me know if i got it right.  I was also a bit surprised at how quickly they had glued the frames into the nuc's as we'd only been driving 4 hours but 2 were stuck down tight.

Here's my girls in their new home, it definitely didn't take them long to find the food:

Once they were all in and I managed to get the inner cover and telescoping cover on without squishing anybody I moved on to the second nuc.

I wish I would have remembered to snag a picture when I opened it but I was a bit startled by the explosion of bee's when I opened the second nuc.  There were quite a few in my face and so much noise that I just forgot to pick up the camera and moved slowly and deliberately getting them moved over.  I did get this shot after I had the frames moved out of the nuc.

Now getting them out created quite a stir I had to smack the box and you can imagine the crazy amount of bee's in the air, but everyone made it into their new home.


Here's my two final shots this first one is of the smaller nuc but it didn't take them long to head in as the inclement weather was rolling in.

This was the larger nuc and everyone wasn't as cooperative about going inside.

That wraps up my first day as a real bee keeper, tomorrow I'll be in the hives briefly just to have my mentor double check I didn't mess anything up and the spacing is good.