Moving at the speed of a Honey Bee

I finally received my bees and my equipment on Saturday all within 3 hours of each other. Talking about calling it close. Doesn't help that Dadant was closed on Good Friday and spring break for my 4 year old son was the following week. I was extremely lucky that a friend of mine, Mike, from church had decided to take the class and raise bees with me. Or God was actually wanting a couple of laughs. Mike and I decided to order all of our equipment from dadant and have it delivered to his house. He put 4 complete hives together. He said the first 2 took a little over an hour a piece but by the time he did the last 2 he had it down to 45 minutes per hive. iIwas able to get back in time to put some frames and foundation together. I told him that I would also put the supers together but that's not for another month. So hopefully I can get that done in time.

Once I got back in town and attending my sons soccer practice I met over at Mikes house to do a little prep work and to pick up my equipment. He showed me his set up and we were off to pick up our bees. The place we were picking them up from called us twice to see if we were on our way. They closed at 5pm and it was only 2:30 so we would be there by 3:15 but when we picked them up we discovered we were about the last one to pick up their bees. They had ordered over 230 packages!! I hope we didn't get the scrapes but there wasn''t very many dead bees in the pakages so I wasn't concerened.

Once we arried at my house, we set up my equipement and put the bees into the hive. I have read numerous ways to empty the bees into a hive but I decided on the following:

Take 5 frames out of a 10 frame hive body and then put the package of bees in the space were the 5 frames were located. The reason I slectd this method was just in case there was a lot of dead bees I would be shaking them all over the interior VS. putting in the open package into the hive and then in a day or two you open the hive and take the package out, put back the 5 frames and your good to go. No mess for the bees to clean. See the video to see why you should wear a bee suit when doing this.



THE ONLY CONCERN IS THE TEMPERATURE SATURDAY WAS ONLY ABOUT 45 SO I HOPE THEY MAKE IT.