After my last post yesterday, Joel and I drove to Fall River to watch the demo installs and do our own. Apparently it was a big day at BCC...even the Bristol Bee was there!

Poor Everett must have been ready to curl up in the truck (bees and all) to go to sleep, having driven from Georgia in the past 24 hours, but he was a trooper.


Here's what a queen looks like up close (she's the one with the green dot):



The BCC students then installed two more hives, and then it was time to get our bees.

The truck was positively HUMMING with all those boxes of bees! I figure there were probably 40 boxes, and 9000 bees per box...that's a lot of bees!!


Back at home, we tried to go as smoothly as the demo did. On the whole, we did ok. I got stung once and apparently I didn't whack the box to get the bees down as hard as I should have, so there were a lot of bees still in the box when I finally surrendered, but it all worked out in the end.



I went out later in the day and they seemed to be doing their thing. I even located a drone and the girls had some fun holding him gently! Drones are male bees that do not sting, so kids can hold them without fear.

Morning of Hive Install

Well, here it is, the day I've been waiting for...the arrival of Queen Julia and the girls!! Although I don't feel nearly as prepared as I'd like to be, the hives are pretty much ready to go, the syrup is made, the foundation has been stapled into the frames, and now I'm just waiting for my partner in crime (Joel) to come so we can head down to Bristol Community College and watch how an install is done before we attempt it ourselves.

Bees tomorrow!

Good morning! Today is our last bee-free day. I say "ours" but it's really me on this bee endeavor. I'm hoping to get the rest of the family more interested, but I think my husband is pretty nervous about it and my older daughter just keeps asking me "Why do you like bees so much?" I have completed a 6 week class with my husband's childhood friend Joel and we each have a hive in my back yard. Joel lives in a downtown area in RI, so it's not really conducive to a beehive around there.

So here's my plan. I have to go to the store to buy sugar to make some "bee soup." No, you don't add bees to bee soup. It's a sugar supply to tide the bees over while they get situated in their new homes. You see, they woke up yesterday morning in Tennessee, all happy and flying around and gathering nectar, when all of a sudden they were unceremoniously dumped into a screen box with a queen they don't know. They are spending the day on a truck driving to an unfamiliar land (the state of Massachusetts) where they don't know the layout or even the flowers in the area. They will have no cells built to put honey or larva in, and they won't be bringing any babies with them. In short, they'll have their work cut out for them! As the Bee Mama, my job is to make it a little easier for them until they get up on their feet (all six of them) and can produce larva, honey, and comb on their own.