Drove up North and picked me up some ladies!

About 10,000 of them anyway. On April 20th me and my son, drove up to Logan to pick up our Honey Bees. I ordered them in February as "Nuc's". Nuc is short for Nucleus Hive. This is One of three ways that most people start off as a Beekeeper. The other two is buying a package which is basically a box made of screen filled with three pounds of female worker bees, and a queen in her own small cage (Because she is normally not the mother of the bees, so they need a few days to get used to her, if not they might kill her before accepting her.) And, the third is catching a swarm. Swarm's can occur in the spring and usually are a result of the spring buildup of the hive that is pretty rapid. If the bees are not given enough room to expand and feel crowded they will raise a new queen and approx half of the hive will swarm (Go find a new Home.) In all the horror movies featuring bees, the swarm is what you need to watch out for. Actually, in reality when bees swarm that is when they are at their tamest and if you find them before they establish a new home they are rather easy to capture and transfer to your own hive. The first way that I mentioned is the Nucleus hive, and this is what I chose to go with. Basically The Apiary (beefarm) will allow a hive to raise a virgin queen, they will allow her to mate, and then throw her into a 5 frame mini hive with some worker bees (either made out of wood like a big hive or a waxed cardboard box.) They will do this about a month before the buyer is scheduled to pick up the bees. During this time the Queen will lay eggs and establish brood, while the workers build up comb, work out in the fields and bring in honey and pollen. That way by the time I picked up my bees they were already established into their own Nucleus Hive... Nuc. We brought them home, set up our Hive boxes and basically just opened up the cardboard boxes and transferred the frames over to our hives. Then we added a few empty frames for the bees to fill up and left them to their work. I installed the first nuc, and while taking Video I allowed my 17 year old son Rodney to install the second one...