Last year we officially moved back to Texas (for the time being) and were finally able to fulfill one of our goals, to get a beehive! With the large garden that we have, the pollinators would be a lovely addition, plus bees are just awesome. A friend of mine set me up with a friend of hers (Laura) that was selling some of her beloved hives and we had just the spot for them. After a meet and greet with the bees, we decided that they would be a great addition to our small little homestead. Our new bee friend Laura was a huge help in the process of helping us through the first summer and fall with the hive. We certainly had lots of challenging moments and a few mishaps, but overall the bees are still happy and healthy. Right now they are enjoying the spring blooms and pollen!
One of those mishaps happened when we were getting the hive ready for the winter. We wanted to thoroughly check the hive and make sure they were in good shape and had plenty of honey to get through the winter. In the process of doing this, the queen must have been on the bottom of one of the boxes we were lifting off and had fallen into the grass. The bees started acting very strange and were swarming the box that we had sat aside, we also noticed bees were fighting and killing each other on the box lid that we had sat aside. Things were getting weird! We closed everything up and left the bees for the day feeling defeated. Our friend Laura came out a few days later and her and Tony checked the hive to see how it was fairing after our event. No queen to be found and there were bees swarming on the front of the box. We came up with a backup plan to let this swarming hive take over for the winter and then possible re-queen in the spring.
Tony went back out to try and get the swarm into the box, when he noticed a group of bees close to the ground. With a closer look, her realized that the group of bees was huddled around the queen, trying to keep her warm! Tony fumbled with his gloves and managed to get the queen into his hands. He ran all the way back to the house and into the kitchen. He had failed to notice the 80 bees that were all over his head net and now in our house! I grabbed a jar to put the queen in and he removed himself (and the bees) from our house. We messaged Laura to let her know the good news and then Tony grabbed our queen and (after dropping her one more time) managed to get her into the box. Needless to say we were excited to have our queen safely inside their home and acting like normal bees again. We were thrilled when we checked the hive last month to see that they had honey left and a queen that was safe and sound!
