Any good memories of installations the more experienced keeps want to share?
You know, just a general ask questions, tell stories, or whatever kind of thread...
Well, since you asked, here's a duplication of an e-mail I sent to a friend of mine about my original package install. I had done over a year of research beforehand, but I had never worked bees or been around anyone who worked bees before (I don't have a mentor), so it was a totally new experience. Just for some context, this was April of 2018, and Haley is my sister. I hope you enjoy.
"I have bees! Yeah!! Oh, everything is going so well! So I am a beekeeper, but the bees didn't come on the date originally expected. They were delayed until the 13th of April because the weather was bad. This was actually really good because once we knew that we were getting packages instead of nucs, I wanted to get a queen excluder for each hive. We ordered them through a local farm store, and they took FOREVER to get here. Had the bees not been delayed I would have had to rig something. Definitely not going to order from them again.
The day we drove to pick them up the weather was great, sunny and warm. It took us a while to get there because the Mapquest directions were missing a step (?!), and so we missed a turn. The place we picked them up, Wild Mountain Bees, is a beekeeping store, and I could have spent a lot more time in there just looking at all the stuff they had. All the people who worked there were really nice. They were all young and hip, part of the urban tree-hugger scene (and I don't mean that in a negative way, they had a great vibe). We went into the back area of the store, and all the packages were sitting there, lined up on the floor. The girl told us to pick whichever ones we wanted. Me and Haley walked up and down the rows, looking to see which packages had the tightest cluster of bees and no stragglers on the outside. Before we left I watched their installation video on a TV they had set up in the store, and I also bought 2 shims (those are just 1 inch spacers to provide some extra room for feed).
When we got out to the car, we noticed a bee sitting on the outside of one of the packages. We felt bad just leaving her there when she wanted to be with her friends, so we put her in a mesh bug catcher we'd brought along for this very purpose. We put the packages in mesh laundry bags to contain any other stragglers that might escape, and put them in the back of the Suburban, surrounded by pillows and towels and stuff to keep them from sliding around.
When we got home I lit my smoker just in case I needed it, and me and Haley got suited up. We had done a dress rehearsal a few days before, so we were fully prepared with everything we'd need. We took the first package up to the hives. I took out the queen cage, shook the bees off the outside, and took a look at my first queen, Cleopatra, to be sure she looked okay. I tacked her cage to a frame and then turned the package upside-down and shook all the bees in the hive. Some of them flew, but not too many, and I was shocked at how easily they just tumbled out! I would have thought they'd at least try to hold onto the box, but they really didn't! We closed up that hive and let the bees settle down a little bit. A lot of them were flying in circles around the hive, orienting themselves with their surroundings. When bees move into a new hive, all the bees take turns going outside and familiarizing themselves with the landmarks around the hive, so they can find their way back when they leave to forage.
The second package went just as smoothly. The queen in that package looked good too, Queen Boadicea. Her namesake is the queen of the ancient Celts, pronounced bo-ah-di-KAY-ah (in real classical Latin, at least). Since that's kind of impossible for anyone but me and Haley to say, we usually just call her Boa. We spent the rest of the afternoon on lawn chairs in the driveway, just watching the bees orienting and sometimes coming over and investigating us."
