Sweet wife and I recently became beekeepers. We ordered packaged bees from R.Weaver and drove to pick them up in Navasota. We could have had them mailed but we thought the drive would be fun and we didn't want to freak out our mail lady. After a peaceful country drive, we brought our buzzing box home and hived them, which you can watch below ( i highly recommend turning on captions/annotations). Keep in mind, we are complete novices.
As you can see from the video, I'm not one of those cool guys who can do this in underwear and flip flops. I went full Wuss suit. :)
That was near the end of April. We have been back to check on their progress a few times since then. They started building comb at one end of the box and every time we checked back they had gone a little further but the population you start with is fairly small (as bees go) so it was slow going at first.
---Fast forward to today--
It had been about a month since we last checked on them, so we figured it was about time. When they were a tiny fledgling hive, they seemed very docile and sweet. Today, however, they were ferocious !
Sweet wife has been going out there with only a veil and gloves for a while now to check on them with no problem...until today. It seems they forgot all about her feeding them sugar water for the first few weeks and were only interested in our abrupt intrusion. Apparently, prying the well-sealed lid off of their home was seen as rude. The soft buzzes we heard when we first approached turned into an angry roar of vengeful kamikazes. Beth got stung three times before she backed away. I was in my wuss suit, so i replaced the lid and went to check on her.
After rubbing the sting for a second, Sweet wife put on her wuss suit and we went back to finish our inspection.
I didn't expect much since the growth has been fairly slow so far, but was shocked to find they've filled the entire hive box! The hive has at least tripled in size and population. I was completely amazed and impressed. It seems they have been busy as bees.
There was a small piece of honeycomb stuck to the lid, so we scraped it off to take back with us. We decided that we saw what we came to see, so we replaced the lid back and went inside so they could stand down from DEFCON 5 and we could see about our bit of honeycomb.
Our bit of honeycomb
It may have been my imagination and the pride of the harvest but that was the best honey I've ever tasted. As you can see, most of the piece was dry but that bit on the end was fantastic. I can hardly wait until we are able to rob them for real and get pints of the stuff.
It was fun to see how far they have come. We'll definitely have to get another hive body next week so they can continue to grow. The only sad part of the day was Beth getting stung and how many bees died (our suits were covered in stingers). We'll definately use smoke next time to calm them a bit first.
