Ha-bee Mother's Day

Today was a gorgeous day to do this!! 62F, sunny, perfection!

I saw my mom yesterday for Mother's day and I gave her this card. hahaha. I giggle everytime I see it. I had to photoshop myself into the pop up card. It's just hilarious! Happy Mother's Day to all you moms!

Last Bee Installation

Finally, the day has come. Our final bee installation of the season. Third and final beehive! Woot, woot! Here we are getting ready to install the newest addition to our Brooklyn "apiary". This is the hive we ordered this year, and painted a bright, bright green!

Here is James, one of our beehosts, taking out the Queen and getting ready to place her in her new home!

Here he is pouring the rest of the package into the hive. You can see Paul's hand on the left spray down the package with sugar water.  The purpose of the sugar water spray is to calm down the bees, and to distract them while we pour them in.  Pouring 10,000 bees into a hive can get a little overwhelming of the bees, they get agitated, so the sugar water helps a lot.

All the bees in, welcome to your new home ladies!  We'll check on them in 3 days to ensure that the Queen has left her cage.  Can't wait!

New Beehive Location

Last year, we had one of our beehives atop a rooftop in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, the beehive did not do well in that location. Therefore we decided to move it to a garden location instead.  Luckily, we found another beehost with a backyard.  We picked up our package of bees early one morning here, and we put them in a shopping bag and taxied over to Brooklyn.

 

This location is just perfect. There is a large Magnolia tree right above the beehive. When we saw the tree in bloom, I was breathless! Spectacular! Just wow! Seriously, this photo does not do it justice. In person, it was amazing.

Package installed! The bees will like there new home for sure!

Here's Paul putting in the frames after we installed the package. How gorgeous is this location????

I can't think of a more perfect home for our beehive! Picture perfect!

Columbus Circle Pickup

Last week, I woke up at the crack of dawn to meet up with some folks at Columbus Circle. What were we all doing here? We waited for a good hour and a half.

Finally a non-descript white van pulls up. We all bum rush the van.

Can you see it now?

Another view.

Yup, we were all here to pick up our babies. All 10,000 of them!

This guy picked up 5 bee packages. We were here to pick up two.  This year we are doing 3 hives in total. One we already installed, and these two completes the other hives.  Every year, our former bee teacher organizes a bee pickup, where he drives down to Georgia to pick up Italian honeybees and drives them up to NYC for distribution to all those that ordered through him.  It's a really interesting experience to see a group of 50+ people show up to pick up bees in the middle of midtown Manhattan.  You should see all the looks we get from passerbys. LOL. Priceless.