Giving your honey bees a home

Installing fresh bees into your hives

This is another in a continuing series of posts that follow the beekeeping column I recently concluded with the Boyertown Bulletin. It was a lot of fun to write about one of my favorite subjects for a local audience.

Here’s a bonus video I created that should get you ready for installing some bees:

BEE SPACE | Setting up your hives – February 2023

Your bees arrived! Now what?

The arrival of your first package of bees is the last step in a lot of preparatory work. A beekeeper ordering packages, as discussed in the January edition of the column, will find themselves getting their bees in late March or early April.

It pays to have gotten all your affairs in order to make sure that your bees can be installed immediately. Clear your schedule the day of your bee install. While these bee packages can sit for a few days, I like to install mine immediately. The only time I haven’t was during heavy rain. Installation gives bees time to acclimate to their new environment, build comb, free the queen from her “queen cage,” and get her laying some eggs.

To install bees from a package is a bit harrowing the first few time you do it. A YouTube search will give you plenty of videos showing the process and I highly recommend seeing it done on video, because it is a bit of an art form to do it flawlessly. This has been a difficult column to write for that reason, but I’ll make an attempt at explaining the process.

Each package is made up of a screened-in wooden container with a stapled-on wooden lid, hiding a circular hole in which a can of sugar syrup is sitting. Ten thousand bees are inside, along with the queen’s cage holding the matriarch. Your job is to get those thousands of bees into the wooden hive and put the queen into a secure space, giving the workers access to her to release her from her cage. A chunk of fondant separates the queen from escape. Workers will, over the course of a day or two, eat away at that fondant and eventually rescue the queen, all the while getting used to her pheromones, a critical step in them accepting their new mother.

Wrench off the small square lid of the bee package. Keep the lid nearby. You will see a small strap going into the crack around the sugar syrup container. This leads to the queen cage. We need to get her out before we let the many, many worker bees out of their package. Gently pull out the can of sugar syrup, while also holding onto the queen cage strap. Once both are out, quickly put the wooden lid back on to keep the bees from spilling out. After checking to make sure the queen is healthy, keep her warm, such as in an outer pocket of a jacket, as you begin to dump the bees. Yes, dump! You’ll have to vigorously and perhaps violently shake the bees out of the wooden package into the beehive. Get as many as you can freed. Any leftovers will likely find their way into the hive themselves. Take out the queen cage and, CAREFULLY, remove the plug from the “candy” end of the cage. I like to use a small picture hanging nail for this step, and then I like to secure the cage to a frame using a rubber band, so that she does not drop into the bottom of the hive by accident.

Put your frames back in and close up the hive. You have successfully done an install! And if you made mistakes, lucky you, you’ll likely be trying again, because as I advised a few columns ago, you’ll want to install two hives. In our next column, we’ll talk about what bees are doing inside their hive all day during this early spring season.

Will Caverly is the author of the beekeeping thriller Here, the Bees Sting and lives in Chester County with his family. Find more of his work at www.willcaverly.com. He loves to get questions at will.caverly@gmail.com.