Starting a Bee Hive

I decided to get a bee hive for my small farm this year. I have multiple fruit and nut trees, grape vines and a small garden. I have noticed the last few years that we have little to no honey bee activity and the number of fruits on the trees is quite small.

I thought I would talk about my experience to help others decide if they want to give it a try. I started out by reading as much as possible on the internet and I can post some of the better links if anyone wants. I decided on buying two hive bodies (over 9 inch boxes for bees to live in, queen to lay eggs, and store some honey and pollen), two supers (over 6 inch boxes used for bees to store honey) and the tops and bottoms.

A friend of my family Leo had decided to get rid of his hive and sold the basic equipment to me for a good price. Thanks again Leo. This gave me one hive body and one super with the internal frame and foundation with a migratory top, inner top, queen excluder and bottom. He included some basic survival gear as well such as a hood, gloves and smoker. I bought two more supers with frames and foundation, and one more hive body with frames.

I was extremely fortunate to have a friend at church Bill who keeps bees and he had a recently collected swarm of bees that he let me keep. Thanks Bill. I assembled, cleaned and repainted the older hive components, painted the new hive components and placed them together before Bill arrived. Bill brought over the bees after dark so that they had returned to the hive and were more docile for movement. We left them overnight in his hive body and then waited for them to fly out the next day before we moved his frames and foundation into my hive body. I gave him new frames and foundation as a trade out.

This is a VERY big advantage for a new bee keeper as it gave me not only bees but bees with some existing honey, pollen and larvae on foundation that has already been drawn out. (That means the honeycomb has already been created on the foundation.) This is a great advantage because the queen has a place already built to lay eggs and I have new bees already hatching every day to replenish the hive. I plan to leave the bees alone except to water them for the next five days or so then open the hive to check on the building out of new foundation and to get some pictures.