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.

Bee Arrival Part 1

We've had a flurry of activity these last few weeks. We ordered 3 packages of bees. The arrival of the first package of bees was picked up two weeks ago! Look at these beauties!

I was seriously grinning from ear to ear. All winter I anxiously awaited for spring to come so that we could beekeep again! I was so beyond excited in this photo! Could you tell? LOL....

Here we are getting ready to pour the bees into the beehive! This photo reminds me of one of those old bad "attack of the alien" movies. hahahha

Bees poured in and we put the Queen's cage between two frames. The Queen is delivered in a separate cage and a piece of sugar candy is lodged in the bottom of the cage.   The purpose of keeping the Queen separate is so the worker bees get accustomed to her pheromone. In 3 days time, the worker bees should have eaten through the sugar candy and release the Queen. We'll come back in 3 days to check on her!

Bee-zy, Bee-zy, Bee-zy April!

April started off extremely busy, because it's official the start of beekeeping season up here in the Northeast!  Our bees were slated to come mid-April so there was lots for us to do. Including ordering and painting our new hive! This new addition brings our hive total to 3! The new hive will be located right next to our other one. And since Bees need help navigating to their hive home, we decided to paint the hive a different color than the other one. Unlike last year, we decided not to build our Langstroth hives, it just took too long to do so, and frankly for $20 more, we can buy a full hive kit pre-assembled.  $20 extra to me was a no-brainer.  We ordered a beehive kit containing all medium boxes.  Here are the boxes getting painted.

I'm just loving the bright green color that was chosen!!

The beehive kit comes with 4 medium boxes! Here it is all painted and assembled!

And next to the other beehive!

It's usually a good idea to put some type of weight on the beehive for strong winds.  Emily, our beehive host decided on this lovely Buddha. I think it's quite fitting. Happy Buddha, overseeing our lovely beehive!

Stay tuned for my next post! The bees are arriving!!