Getting Started in Beekeeping

My wife and I took a shot at beekeeping this past summer and had some mixed results. We started by attending 'bee school'. The RI Beekeepers Association sponsored the session that we attended and I have to say it was very interesting. The class met once per week for about 10 weeks and by the end we had the knowledge (and contacts) necessary to get started. 

We hooked up with someone who regularly goes down south to get what are called installation packages. This is basically just a small box with about 10,000 bees in it and 1 queen. The queen is kept in a small wooden box with a couple of attendants in there with her. More on that later. We got our bees around the end of April. I have to admit I was a little freaked out driving home with 10,000 bees in the back of my truck. Fortunately, it was an uneventful ride home.

When we got them home, my wife and I put on the bee suits (which look strikingly similar to hazmat suits), opened up the empty hive and dumped the bees into it. There were still some left in the box, but we just left it opened in front of the hive. They found their way in eventually. Next, we took the queen box and gently placed it in the hive. What is supposed to happen is that the queen is protected inside the box. If she wasn't in there, the other bees would kill her. The purpose of the box is to allow the queen to gradually get introduced to the rest of the colony. The queen box has a little hole in the top which is plugged up with a piece of hard sugar. Over the course of about 3 days, the queen's attendants eat through the sugar so that by the time they are free, the queen should be acclimated to the rest of the colony. 

That's it. Pretty simple. I'll post some more regarding some of the more interesting things that we encountered in our little experiment.