Bees are happy

Today, I went to check on the bees. Did not open the hive, just made sure that the hive is still alive and the new queen appears to be producing brood. The number of bees at the entrance seems to be about the same as before the new queen was introduced. That is a good sign.

Long live the queen!

Immediatelly after the tragedy yesterday, I called Noel, who sold us the hive and told him what I have done. I asked if he had a queen. He did, so today I picked up new queen in the Queen Cage and installed it in the hive. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

The Queen is dead!

Today was a bad day. My second inspection of the hive ended in tragedy.
I want to check the health of the hive, inspecte the super quickly to make sure that bees are capping honey. Then i went to check the brood box to make sure that queen is healthy and laying. I inspcted all frames, never saw the queen. There were too many bees there. But i saw the larvae and eggs, so I knew that queen is there and laying.
After I put the hive back together I noticed a cluster of bees on the ground below the hive. I gave them a puff of smoke to disoerse them, and there she was. The Queen was layin there, crushed. I must have hurt her when removing the frames or putting them back. Horrible beginers mistake. That is the last time I wear gloves during brood box inspection

Got the Bees!

We got our bees last night! Went to one of the members of the TBBA and picked up a whole hive of bees. Some say that it is not easiest way to start the beekeeping career, but to me it was pretty easy. :) We drove to his place loaded a netted beehive onto a pickup truck, then drove it to our place and put the bees on the beestand that I built the previous weekend. Done. We have our first bee hive! The next day I went back and removed the empty netted super that was holding the excess bees, and replaced it with our first brand new super. See the attached video. Sorry about the quality. It was shot on my iPhone.

We will have bees!

Around Christmas my wife Jitka and I have decided that we will start keeping bees. Not sure why. I guess, because it felt like a right thing to do. Bees are responsible for 1/3 of human food production with their polination. Recently, in last few decades, bees are decimated by multitude of pests and diseases. More people keeping bees the better.
Of course we did not know any of that, when we decided to keep bees. We just wanted to have bees, watch them grow and enjoy the honey.
So, we joined a local beekeeping club, Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association, awesome organization. Met lot of great people and started learning about bees.
Can't wait until we get our own bees.