Part 3 Spring Bee Keeping Activities - Starting New Hives

There are many ways to start a new hive of bees. This year, we started new hives three different ways. I will highlight each method, with a little bit of story telling so you can get to know us a little more as well.

Bee Packages

This is probably the most common way to start a bee hive, especially for new bee keepers. The main benefit of bee packages is that you get to see your bee hive basically starting from scratch. In late-April we purchased two packages of bees. Each package comes with about 2 pounds of bees plus a queen.

Photo: Transporting the two bee packages from Hanford to Fresno inside our family van (hence the car seats). It's a little scary driving know that there are hundreds of bees right behind the driver seat!

This year, Gathering Table had the opportunity to start a Bee Keeping Apprenticeship program, where two young men learn the basics of bee keeping. We are using the two bee packages for starting two new demonstration hives for the program, so they can learn about caring for a hive starting from the very beginnings.

Photos: (Top) The two apprentices gently shaking the bees out of the wooden packages into the bee hives. (Bottom) Part of the apprenticeship program is learning what the Bible says about farming and bee keeping, and how it applies to our lives. Before working on the hives, we meet at a beautiful back yard garden next door to dig into the Bible (no pun intended) and build community with each other.

Splits

Another common way to start a new bee hive is by doing what is called bee hive "splits". You can split your own hives, or purchase them (commonly called "nucs") from another local bee keeper. We decided this year to do our own splits. To do this you need to already have a strong, established bee hive available. You basically take 5 "frames" out of one or more established hives and put them in what is called a "nuc" box (a starter hive). You can either introduce a new queen, or let the bees make a queen themselves.

Photo: In one of our "nucs" from doing a split, one week later the bees were making their own queen. The queen cells are the peanut shaped cells on this frame. It takes about one month for the bees to make a queen, from egg to the queen now laying its own eggs.

Swarms

The third way that we started new hives this year, was by capturing swarms. This can be a great way to start a new hive. It is also sure to get the adrenaline pumping! The video below shows a swarm that showed up one day on our side yard, in a spare box that we were storing! (We totally meant to do that, haha)

Now, let me explain what a swarm is, as a lot of people misunderstand what that means. Typically, since there are so many bee keepers and bee hives in our area (surrounding Fresno and Clovis), a swarm of bees that shows up at your house (in a tree, side of a house, etc) is most likely bees that left a nearby bee hive. The bees can leave for many reasons, but the most common one being that during the spring/early summer with an abundance of flowering plants, bee hives can quickly get overcrowded if not given more space.

What happens next, is a miracle of nature. The bees quickly go into "swarm-mode". They start making a new queen for the survival of the hive, and then, right before that queen is about to hatch, the existing queen and about half of the bees in the hive swarm. Essentially they make their own split. It is a natural way (God's way) for bee hives to reproduce and multiply. So, first thing to remember is that swarms are not a bad thing. They are natural. And they help your local bee population. And second, that because they have no honey or larva (baby bees) to protect, they are very gentle. It may not look like it, with bees frantically flying everywhere, but any bee keeper who has worked with swarms will tell you that swarms are so gentle that you don't even need to wear a bee suit (I'm not that crazy though... yet).

Photo: After the bees from the swarm on my side yard were all in the box, I simply loaded the box onto my truck that evening and then took them out to our bee yard nearby in Clovis the next morning. The next day they were happily flying around with tons of wild flowers to feed on and plenty of distance away from houses and people.

In summary, we started new hives this year with bee packages, splits and swarms, allowing us to grow from 12 to 20 hives in a natural and fun way. One way you can support Gathering Table and the local bee population, is to "Adopt a Hive". Each of our hives has a music-themed name to make it even more fun! To learn more, check out the Community Supported page on our website.

Blessings,

Jeff