Saturday, May 4, 2013

The Bees Have Arrived

Yes :) the bees are home now :) 2 strong colonies!
I've made 2 transport boxes which can accommodate 12 swedish låg-normal frames. I was supposed to get 20 frames with each colony but I told the beekeeper to keep 8 which were empty because I will not use frames with mono-cell foundation in my Top Bar Hives. Each colony had 10 frames with cupped brood and uncupped. There are also newly laid eggs in the cells :) we couldn't see the Queens but the eggs are a good indicator that these colonies are Queenright. Not just that, these bees are also very gentle. Not even one bee attacked us yet we moved all of them into a new hive.
As you can see in this pic I have placed the transport hives in front of the top bar hive they will be moved into. I will move the bees tomorrow into the horizontal top bar hives but first I will have to perform a so called "chop'n'crop". The frames are rectangular and top bar hives have sloped side walls in a V shape. To place a framed comb I will have to do some cropping and removing of the frame sides and the bottom. I have designed the top bar hives so I don't have to crop too much of the framed wax comb. I will try to make a video of me doing the chop'n'crop tomorrow since it can be very educational. I have learned this technique from Phil Chandler's video on you tube.
Stay tuned :)

2 comments:

  1. Congratulations! It must be a very special day for you. Your first own bees :-)

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    1. Thank you! Im looking at them now and they performing orientation flights :)
      Today chop'n'crop. Moving them into TBHs :) The temperature is 16'C but it is windy

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