After driving an hour to Owen/Withee and laying down 150 large (or "large" for me at least) for the 20,000 bees and two queens, it was off to install them into their new homes. It's an odd feeling driving somewhere with one passenger, and coming back with 20,003... The bees were well behaved, and barely made any noise for the duration of the trip. One little guy managed to make it out of the cage (or was out to begin with) and kept myself and my girlfriend Ezra company on our way to the hive locations.
We arrived at dusk, and decided that the weather was good enough to install at least one of the packages. Slightly cloudy, about 55-60 degrees, and a bit windy. We arrived at the "Hilltop" location at approximately 7PM and proceeded to set everything up.
Supplies necessary for the task included:
-Hive (2 Medium Supers with 10 frames each, screened bottom board, queen excluder, inner cover, outer cover)
-Hive tool
-Spray bottle with 2:1 water/sugar solution
-Feeder with 1:1 water/sugar solution
-Marshmallow, for the queen cage
-...and everything else.
Notice the lack of protective equipment in that list... My reading around this time had been focusing on inspecting the hive AFTER the bees were established, which requires little-to-no protective equipment. However--for the record--when installing a package of 10,000 confused, homeless honeybees you are going to want protection.
After a light spritzing of sugar syrup, I extracted the can of syrup and the queen cage. The queen was alive and healthy, and I gave it to Ezra's dad to hold onto while I maneuvered the bees into the hive.
Now the way you are to "install" these bees is to tap the edge of the package on the hive to make them pour into the hive like liquid.
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