Bees, 2015

Today we put two packages of bees in two of our empty hives (the other empty has been populated by splitting our hive that overwintered). Here are my two helpers. Chayce did most of the install on her own.

Bees - you buy them by the pound. These are two #3 packages, each with one queen. Three pounds is 10,000-12,000 bees.

Payge and her package

Stragglers going in after the main body of bees were dumped into the hive.

Chayce and her package

You can't see her, but this is a queen package and a very shy queen. It took 20 minutes to get this queen to come out despite the delicate, though incessant fawning of her new attendants. 

This was taken a few weeks later when Quinton came to help me check on some new queens we had to get for these colonies.

Monkey bars

Although it has been planned for more than a year, we finally put in the monkey bars to accompany the sandbox. We made copious amounts of mud in the process of watering in the quick dry cement for the posts. It turned out surprisingly study and easy to build.