Life at Wild Willow Hollow: Getting Ready For "The Girls"

This Blog has been a while coming and a lot has happened so I'll try to start from the beginning as we start on our Bee adventure. Last year we talked about getting into beekeeping, we attended a workshop and got a great exposure to beekeeping and we were hooked. Lots of reading and research over the winter and in the spring we ordered our first colony. They call this a Nuc, short for nucleolus of bees as it is just a queen with a few frames and about 15,000 bees to start off. And they'll build up their number over the summer and be strong enough to survive the winter, but I get ahead of myself.

So before we ordered our Nuc, I decided that since I'm a woodworker I'll make our own hive and such, and with building bee hives for dummies in hand I started. I just had to make sure I maintained one simple rule, keep the "Bee Space" the same. If the spacing is too small they'll close it up with populous and if it's too big they'll build combs in this space and make it hard to move around or when taking out the frames damaging them. Everything went great, the hive body (super) was done, a bottom board, inner cover, outer cover and an entrance reduce were constructed. Now to make the frames to hold the foundation. The foundation in our case are plastic and have a honey coating to make it more appealing for the bees to work on. The foundation has honey comb pattern on it and this is were the bees will draw out the wax for either making a brood chamber, new bees, or for storing honey. with this first super done we were ready for our first Nuc and so we ordered "The Girls" as I call them. As we waited I thought it would be best to have more on hand and I make a couple of more medium supers and one small one. All our super are 8 frame boxes, we could have made them 10 frame but we thought it would be better with 8, it can get heavy when filled with honey. So we waited for the call to pick them up.