The bees have landed

After around ten months of planning, pondering and purchasing, our tiny farm has finally welcomed our newest little residents!

We picked up our nucleus hive yesterday morning and plonked it right next to our hive, which has been waiting months for our bee friends to join us.

After a day to settle in (and because the weather was a combination of wind, rain and patchy sun yesterday), we did the transfer this morning.

We stoked the smoker with parts of an old hessian sack and smoke started pouring out. Success! The smoke is supposed to calm the bees by making the warning pheromones they might send to each other if danger is about.

Now, in the lead up to collecting our nuc, we’d been reading some horror stories of angry bees on the internet – the stuff of nightmares involving epi pens and paramedics, so today, I was taking no chances – full bee suit, smoker, elbow length gloves – I was pretty unrecognisable as a human, let alone myself. And in case you were wondering, the answer is yes. I was absolutely trying to confuse the bees into submission.

By the time I’d geared up, and checked each of the zippers three times, the smoker had literally run out of puff. But after a quick top with hessian in the smoker we were on! I wasted no time puffing smoke into the entrance to the nuc.

The lid of the nuc peeled off really easily and there wasn’t any propolis between the frames so I’m guessing this nuc was from a recently split hive rather than these bees having spent any significant amount of time in the nucleus hive. I gave a few more puffs for good measure, and then a few more because it made me feel like a real beekeeper.

There weren’t nearly as many bees as I was expecting – which was a good thing! – and they largely seemed to ignore me as I lifted the frames from the nuc, looked them over and popped them into their new home.

I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for but cast a dutiful and thorough eye over each frame in turn because the instructional video told me I had to.

Things got a bit more interesting on the second frame with a whole lot more bees and what I think was some brood comb (the yellow capped cells on the left in the picture above). I really hope it is brood comb – we need this for the hive to grow and thrive and eventually give us some honey.

On the third frame there was a little black container which must have held the queen when she was introduced to the hive. The bee person we purchased our nuc from recommends Italian bees for their docile nature.

When we’d first heard discussion of these different types of Eurpoean bees we though they were joking. But bee keeping is serious business, as it the fine art of raising pedigree Queen bees, apparently, so we now like to pepper our bee conversations with questions about Queen bee heritage and debate the pros and cons of Russian bees over Spanish. We think we sound worldly and informed. Friends think we sound a little odd.

When the last frame was in place I gently added three new frames for the girls to build on to the outside of the nuc frames. And we were done!!

Lid on, ready for the bees to find all the amazing flowers we’ve planted in our garden and beyond. Hopefully they will grow strongly and we’ll be adding either another brood box or the honey super before we know it!