bees | Crooked Beak Acres

First off, we are no experts! This is our first attempt at honeybees but I wanted to pass some information along that was very helpful in our venture. Below you will find the steps that we used to make our experience easy, quick, and pretty much simple.

Find a Reputable Bee supplier
Purchase all start-up equipment
Ask a ton of questions while doing so… (of course you could make it easy and take a class from the extension office or your state bee club… we chose the hard way…never time to take a class this time of year)
Place an order for the number of hives you want (also match the hive set-up too)
Set up the site for the bees
Assemble the frames
Place the hives out in the prepared area
Pick up your bees……. ‘install’ method below

Our first step was taking a ‘bee introduction’ class at our extension office. This was in November (I think) during our slow time at the farm. It gave me a lot of ideas, but not the answers I wanted. Honestly, I am afraid of the bees. I was never comfortable with them and do not like getting stung. But then who does, right? I wanted to ‘rent’ some hives from someone with experience. At this point I only wanted the pollinators and was not interested in the honey. Anyways, since this did not work I was told to buy hives and bees and let them go each year. I did not like this idea either so here we are brand new bee owners with all the equipment to go with them. Actually, we are pretty excited about it too, even as apprehensive as I am.

So, I found a supplier all the way across the state that would help me and answer all of the questions I had. What a great person! Jim Cross from the Honey and Bee Connection in Morehead, KY. He suggested only items that I needed to work the bees and not all of the extras and super nice toys that some have. We bought four hives, suits, vitamins, and other items that we needed for the start. Oh, and of course four packages of Italian bees.

We picked out a site in our orchard. See picture above. This will provide the pollination for the orchard and also in a direct flight line with the produce fields. You want the opening of the hive to face South East. So I got out my compass on my phone and set up the site. We were going to remove the grass first… but ran out of time so I just placed the weed barrier paper on top and then we added a wooden barrier around the barrier. Then the gravel (we used limestone fines) was placed in and the hives set up facing southeast. Make sure to level the hives. We were told they need to be perfectly level. Off to pick up the bees.

Bee Packages
Queen Cage
Queen Placement

At the time of pick-up, we were given the instruction on how to place the bees in the hives. This made it easy. Jim’s employee walked several of us through the process of how to do this.

Tap the box on the ground to shake the bees down from the queen and the can that is in the box
Remove the lid to the can, then the can and replace the top cover
Shake the bees down again
Remove the top cover and pull out the queen, shaking as necessary to remove the bees from her little cage, remove the cap and put the little hanger on the other side of her cage
Take the queen cage and staple it to the middle frame at the top and push the frames back together
Take the box of bees and place upside down so the hole will be over the queen
Gently pull the cover our from the box
Place an empty super over the bees, then the inside cover and lid
24 hours later, remove the queen cage and pull the extra super then replace the lid and leave them alone for a week
One week later, make sure the queen is laying eggs
One week later, make sure

Bee Package Placement
Adding the empty Super
Feeding the bees

Sound simple enough, right? John had to do this himself. I had military duty so he was on his own and I have to say he did an excellent job. Even took the photos for me. If you have any questions, let us know. We will be glad to answer any that we can, and if not we can always ask The Honey and Been Connection.

When we started growing produce, we added lots of cut flowers into our fields. Mainly sunflowers and zinnias with a few others mixed in. One of my favorite zinnias was the giant queen red lime. I will add the link below where you can find it. Although we grew many different varieties of sunflowers, the chocolate and red varieties were my favorites. One thing we noticed that year were the bees. There were tons and tons of honey bees in the flowers. Before we planted we did talk to some experts at the extension office, who told us with the two acres of produce we would not need hives. We should have been able to rely on whatever was out there. I guess they were right since there were so many. The flowers had brought in tons of bees. There wasn’t a time where I went out there and didn’t find hundreds.

But last year, we could not find a single bee out there. The only thing we changed that year was that we skipped planting the flowers. This year the plan is to incorporate the flowers back into the fields in addition to purchasing four beehive set-ups. Yesterday, we picked up the hives and other supplies that we will need. The bees are scheduled to arrive in mid-April. I am real excited about them but at the same time a bit hesitant. I am not comfortable with bees or other insects that sting. John is allergic also and has been to the hospital a couple times for insect stings.

So, what do I know about bees? Well, that answer is just about nothing other than they pollinate flowers and fruiting plants. They are a necessity. One thing I learned at the vegetable conference last month was that there are certain plants you can plant that attract the “bad” bugs helping to keep them away from the good ones. So the sunflowers that we planted that year helped to keep the stink bugs and other insects away from our peppers. Sunflowers, buckwheat, and a couple others can be planted in blocks around the field will help lure the bad bugs there and keep them from the peppers. So the plan this year is not only to add the sunflowers back, maybe put in some buckwheat, and to add some flowers in the fields as well. That will naturally help remove some of the insects from the fields and reduce the number of sprays we use, which will help us achieve our organic goals. The flowers will help the bees and that will help our peppers and other produce that we have. I’m taking this as a “win – win” situation.

Crooked Beak Acres

Tag: bees

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