Betterbee | The Hive's Journey

Get your hive ready well before the expected arrival of your bees: Hive stand set up, boxes painted and frames assembled. Set up the hive with a base, top, and only one deep box (or two mediums) to receive the bees. Slide the wood entrance reducer into the entrance, leaving only the small opening available. Cover the notch in the rim of the inner cover with duct tape for the time being. Make sure you have a few large rubber bands and a spray bottle with a little syrup in it.

The night before Bee Pick-Up Day, make a gallon of 1:1 syrup and review our detailed package installation instructions.

It may seem a bit absurd to be feeding honey bees sugar syrup, but it's the surest way to get them off to a good start. It requires an enormous amount of calories to fuel the critical wax-making that a package must do. There is great urgency to get comb drawn out so that the queen may begin laying replacements for the bees in the package which have only a few weeks of life ahead of them. Feeding provides a reliable source of energy, 24/7, and in all weather. You can make your own sugar syrup or feed Pro-Sweet syrup.

Don't let last-minute jitters make you late for the pick-up time. It will be fun!

Plan to install your bees based on the weather patterns in your area. Ideally, installing package bees on drawn combs containing honey and pollen happens in early April; installing bees on frames of foundation usually waits until May for increased forage opportunities. Our honey bee packages are available for pick up in early spring, just in time for warming weather trends and early-blooming flowers. Ultimately you'll have to install your bees when you get them, but a responsible bee supplier shouldnt sell you bees when its still too cold to put them in your hive.

The best time of day to install honey bees is late in the afternoon or early evening. Later in the day, the bees are often calmer and are ready to settle in for the night rather than wander or go out foraging. If its dark, wait until morning to install your package or nuc. Beyond the fact that your visibility is reduced in the dark, the hive may be quite cold since the bees won't have been able to increase the temperature throughout the day. In addition, disturbed bees often crawl and sting when its dark instead of flying which means theyre more likely to end up on you or even inside your beekeeping suit.

First, for a new colony to really take off, it needs to rapidly increase its population. It takes three weeks to raise a bee to working adulthood. But that process can't begin until the queen lays eggs in the cells. And she can't do her job until she has cells to lay the eggs in. But the workers bees won't create a lot of comb until the young wax-making bees' bodies are so richly supplied with calories that their wax glands are pushing out wax scales like crazy. When you drill down to the start of this chain of events, it mostly depends on having an abundance of available calories. If you provide sugar syrup, you jump-start the wax-making process by providing an early, constant source of calories. Feeding also evens out the sometimes on-again, off-again natural spring nectar flow which helps keep wax production continuing at full speed.