As I posted yesterday, our bees came and the level of excitement went up like a million percent! At times, the bees were quiet; at other times, they were stirring up quite a brouhaha. At one point, I even took a brush and smeared the wire with honey I had sitting in the kitchen cabinet to calm them down. It seemed to work, because they all zapped over to the wire walls and sucked that liquid sweetness up their little straws (i.e. their chewing-lapping mouthpart also known as a proboscis).I went to bed rather late last night and heard the alarm go off this morning at 5 and I did not want to get up! “‘F’ this, man . . . Forget this, yo!” is the only thing I thought when the alarm buzzed its stirring, but annoying ringing. But I had to get up, if not for work, then for the bees.
I quickly gathered everything and headed to the car and traveled the 40 minutes to my friend’s house way out in the county. I arrived on the scene only to find my friend half-asleep and in his sweats. We instantly got down to business, after the formalities of the morning were exchanged.
We turned on the smoker and thanks to the leaves and the multiplicity of twigs from all the surrounding trees, we able to create some awesomely thick smoke. We prepared the syrup bags, since we were going to pick up our feeders later that night. We then suited up and proceeded to perform the daunting task that lay before us: placing the bees in their respective hives.
Now don’t believe what they say or what you see on YouTube: Opening the box of bees is a real challenge! (Ah, but what’s better than a good ol’ morning challenge to start the day off right, right?) But with some patience and quick and easy maneuvering of the syrup can we were able to open the box of bees and get the queen out of the box. Here’s where the morning ordeal took an interesting turn, and not for the best, I would say.
I opened the queen box, the small little box containing the queen and a couple of her attendants and placed it in the hive. I then grabbed the box of Italian bees and with one big jolt, shook them up and put them in their new home. Bees started flying left, the started swirling right. And as crazy as it seemed, it wasn’t the pandemonium that I expected. They were actually quite calm and gentle. After all the bees were released, we then placed our Ziploc bags of sugar syrup on top and began to wrap things up and move on to our box of Russian bees.
The Russians were a big more trickier and louder as well. Call it an old Soviet grudge, but they actually came out flying and landing on us from the get-go. But with patience and a calm hand, we were able to pull out the queen and start preparing this second hive for its new tenants. But right as we were removing the cork from the thin side of the Russian queen cage, she quickly squeezed her way out and took off like a MiG-29 fighter jet, you know, the ones you can pay and ride over the skies of Moscow. I was dumbfounded! I looked at my friend and said: “There goes your queen, my friend.” His reply: “There she goes . . . flying back to Russia!”
We were both shocked and in awe at what had just transpired: the Russian queen bee had flown away, never to be seen or heard from again. What a tragedy! What a lost to those poor Russian bees! How the hell were were going to fix this undesired and unexpected situation?
I quickly called Geneva Miller and told her that we needed a new queen bee. “Is the Queen dead?” she asked. “No, no . . . she, uh, just, um, flew away?” was my answer/question/response. I didn’t want to lie to the old lady who had helped us out so many times before. Rather, I wanted to be honest and straight with her. So I told her the truth. Luckily, she told me that it happens more often than not and that I should call her this evening to see if they had any spare queens from their shipment.
Call it Karma, call it the Baby Jesus, call it God, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Mother Mary the Virgin, I called her this evening around 7:30 p.m. and she had good news: they had 4 spare Russian queens and one of them had my name on it. “Pffew! What a relief!” were the only words that came out of my mouth as I got ready and drove over to pick up her second royal highness.
Now, you may ask: “Why are you telling this story?” Well, to be 100% completely honest, I thought I would mention this to save someone out there some time, money and much unwanted stress. Just remember: you want to be working with your candy end, which is most likely, the thick end. Remove the cork found on the thick end and poke a hole through the candied sugar and let the bees so the rest of work. If you are a beginner, don’t even mess with any of these fancy techniques like removing the wire and then pinching the queen onto the comb. Just play it safe and let the bees do their thing.
If you want to see how this is best done, save yourself some and check this video out
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