Once the almond crop is pollinated in Northern California, commercial bee suppliers break up the hives and sell bees in "packages" to anyone interested in starting a new colony. This generally happens in early to mid-April. Last week, I picked up two bee packages and created two new hives. In this first in a series of two postings, I'll explain what you get when you order a package of bees.
Components of the Bee Package
When you buy bees from a commercial supplier, they arrive in a small crate made of wood and wire mesh. The package contains 3 pounds of bees (10,000-12,000 bees), a queen held in a separate queen cage, and a can of sugar syrup that has been punctured with a finishing nail and hung upside down inside the crate. The sugar syrup supplies the bees with food and water during their journey to your home. It escapes through the holes and clings to the lid of the can due to surface tension; the bees then lap up the sugar syrup as needed.
Photo Below Shows Can & Queen Cage In Place
As mentioned earlier, bee packages are created by breaking up a large colony of bees into many small packages which are then sold to bee keepers. Large bee colonies can contain 60,000 bees, so hives can be broken up into many such packages. However, bee keepers need both worker bees and a queen to establish a new hive and hives only have 1 queen. So to get the additional queens necessary to create packages, commercial bee suppliers breed queens separately and then add one queen to each package.
When your package of bees arrive, the queen is isolated in a smaller cage that is within the larger cage containing the rest of the bees. Queens are kept in this separate cage because it takes time for the worker bees to get accustomed to the new queen. During the transition period, which generally is about 1 week, the workers get used to the smell of the new queen (her pheremones) and learn to accept her. If the queen were introduced into the colony without this transition period, the workers would view her as an invader of the colony and kill her.
There are several different styles of queen cages but all about 3 inches x 1 inch in size. Some are made of wood and wire, others are made of plastic mesh. Whatever the material, these queen cages have a whole in the top that will eventually allow the queen to escape. The entrance is plugged with either a piece of hard candy or a marshmallow. The bees eat through the candy over the course of several days. By then, they have gotten accustomed to the queen and she joins the rest of the colony and begins to lay eggs.
In my next posting, I'll describe how to install a bee package into a hive.
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