New Hobby: Bee Keeping

[massphatness]

Bees 2.0

Having successfully managed to freeze my bees to death over the winter, I was left with a hive full of comb and a lot of usable resources like pollen & honey, but no ladies to work their bee magic.

The pic on the left shows the bees basically frozen in place between frames all bunched together as you might expect for warmth. Pic on the right is after I pulled the frames apart.



This time around, since my first batch of bees had already laid a lot of the groundwork, I opted to go with a nucleus (or "nuc") which is basically a mini working hive of five frames complete with bees and a queen already making brood and storing honey and generally doing bee things.

It comes in a box like this, and thank god I brought bungee cords because one big bump on the road and that top comes flying off. Then voila -- bees in the Jeep!



And with that, I was ready to transfer the frames from the nuc to the hive ...



More later.