New Hives for 2015

Newly installed hives

I'm surprised at how excited I am that the bees have finally arrived! The timing is later in the spring than I had hoped but I'm confident we'll be able to build up enough food stores through constant feeding till fall that they'll make it through the winter. I am able to provide each new hive with 5+ frames of comb already drawn out so that they're not starting completely from scratch!

They are Russian queens again with one very being dark and the other mostly dark, which is one characteristic I enjoy with the Russian bees.

Sugared bees

Since this is later in the season for installing bees, I am feeding fumagillin b for the first two gallons of syrup as a best practice against noseama.  I also took the precaution of sugaring for varroa mites, sifting 10X powdered sugar over the bees which allows for them to remove the mites as they clean off the sugar. They look like ghost-bees when covered with sugar. I had temporarily inserted a bottom board to check the amount of mites present but was hard pressed to find one. That's a good sign the bees came from strong hives.

I'll leave them to do their thing for a few days before checking to see if the queen has been released. I enjoyed watching them them as they got right down to taking orientation flights. I'm so glad to have bees back in the yard again!