8/15/2012

Bee Keeping

This past spring I started a new hobby of raising bees.  I got set up for 2 hives and put the boxes with their frames on a pallet just north of the Riesling grapes. At the end of March my 2 "packages" of bees arrived.  Each box had about 3 pounds of bees and a queen in a cage.  I shook the bees out of the box and into their hives, and then placed the queen cage in between two of the frames in the lower box.  The worker bees eat through a little candy/marshmallow plug at the end of the queen cage. This takes a little time which allows the workers to adjust to and accept the pheromones from the queen.  
 From the get go my hive to the east was always the stronger more active hive.  After waiting too long- I called a local expert to ask for help.  As it turns out- the weak hive had lost the queen at some point during the summer.  So I bought a new queen, and introduced her to the week hive.  


This is a picture of the bees surrounding the queen cage as we tried to introduce a new queen -more updates to come

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