Hey everybody! Remember us?…Two Flakey Frugal Chicks! We’ve been two busy mamas. Today we gave new homes to 20,000 honey bees. I am playing surrogate mom to Suzanne’s honey bees this year. She wants to paint and re-roof her house this summer and thought it would be easier to start her new hives at my house so they’d be out of the way.
Our first stop was to see Harvard Robbins, Suzanne’s bee mentor in Tillicum. What a great guy. If there ever was a bee whisperer it would be him. He loves his bees and his bees love him.
We got two of these boxes of bees. Each box has one queen in her own separate little box.
This little lady wanted to check out my jacket.
The two new hives that the bees will go in to.
We got all suited up in our bee gear and pried the lid off of one of the bee boxes to get the queen out.
The queen is inside this little box that is covered in bees. She has to eat her way out of her box and will then start laying eggs inside the hive.
We used this bee brush to gently brush the bees off of the box the queen was in so we could insert it into the hive.
Then we turned the box that contained all the bees upside down, right on top of the queen in her little box in the hive. Next we added an empty box, a sugar water feeding station and a lid.
And here we are….two bee keepers happy with our days work!.