Bees Have Arrived!

Hooray! Robbie and I picked up our bees on June 2. We drove down to Easley, SC to Porter Farm Bees. Dwight Porter was very helpful and we talked bees for a long time. Then we put our hive with our new bees in the back of the Pilot and we started for home. One bee escaped. We nervously opened the windows and she flew away. A while later, another bee got loose, we opened the windows, and she flew away. Then another and another and another bee got loose and we just drove home with bees flying around in the car. They didn't want to get us, afterall. They just wanted out of the car.

We put them in their spot and left them alone until Saturday. With a crowd of neighbors watching safely from the screened porch, Robbie and I opened the hive for the first time and took a look....

It was fabulous and completely uneventful. The queen had been doing her job. We saw larvae and capped brood. The workers had been doing their job. Lots of nectar turning into honey. Some pollen. One small hive beetle which I personally squished.
After Robbie was finished, his friend Anne Francis donned the suit to have a closer look too.

Curious onlookers. (Alex, Lisa, Laurie, and children Stori, Siena, Anne Francis, Whitney, Robbie, and Ricky)

Lots of bees, capped honey, etc.

It's hot work being a beek!

My only scare so far was when a large number of bees were rocking back and forth listlessly on the front entrance of the hive. I thought surely they had starved. I called my bee mentor Will and he said, no, that it's called bearding and they do that when it gets really hot. And it was really hot. We were in the high nineties with no cooling off in the night. Whew! They weren't all dying after all!