Meanwhile bees were leaving the box in droves, I'd lost control of the situation, and I tried to pierce a red plug on the other end of the cage. Instead of penetrating the red thing, the nail pushed it further into the cage. I left the red "plug" alone at that point, thinking that it was candy. This happened on Friday. Fifteen minutes ago, while lying in bed, it occurred to me that maybe that red thing was not candy, but a plug that should have been removed.

It's a top bar hive. I was told to leave the bees alone for at least five days. Now I'm worried that my Queen is trapped. Shall I disturb them tomorrow to check her out?

And if I do disturb them, should I use smoke? They've had a rough three days in the raw spring weather we've had.

Thanks.

I wish I'd released her yesterday. I checked her, discovered that the red plug I removed was over the cork plug, so she was not able to be released. Then I tried to get the cork out with a sheetrock screw and shoved the cork in with the queen. I am hoping there's enough room for her to get out. In my panic, I forgot to check the feeders, so I'm going to have to disturb both my hives again tomorrow.

Boy! If there's any more ways to screw up, I haven't discovered them yet.

I've also learned that bees can sting through my bee suit (I wore nothing under it; I sure will next time.) and that a few very nearly penetrated my leather glove. !!!

One thing I learned for easy feeding with the frame feeder...put the feeder all the way to the outside, [last frame]. When you come with the syrup, move/slide the top cover gentle to one side....[they hardly know you're there] when you have a slight opening, about 1/2 or 3/4" gap over the feeder you can pour in. I have the plastic frame feeder, I put wood sticks in for floats so they can't get drowned. This way you don't have to smoke them.

My feeder is a overturned Mason jar, but I think I might be able to move the lid slightly, as you describe, to get to it.

konrad, exactly under what circumstances should I smoke my bees?

Thank you both.

Smoking them a little calms them down and you can work the hive easier, not really needed in small population...but when you have two deep hive body full of bees it's a different story. Lets say you put a honey super on over two deep brood boxes, ..it might be one brood box in your case, sometimes a ton of bees are all over the box, smoke will drive them down...it's like herding them, then your'e not squashing bees on top of box when putting another one on.

Check if you see the girls bringing in pollen, hind legs with pollen baskets.

I have read everything I could get my hands on since I received my hive as a Christmas present, but everything I learned seems to have gone out the window.

I ordered bees from an apiarist who called me last Friday and told me that my bees were in. When I got there, she offered me a second colony for free, to put in with the ones I'd ordered. She had five colonies that were doing very poorly, so, worried about the colony I'd purchased, I accepted the second colony with thousands of dead bees in the package. I suspect that was a bad call on my part. I have another colony that also arrived on Friday from a different apiarist.

I'm going to be your worst nightmare, konrad, gmason, because I have a thousand questions, it turns out, and you seem like my port in the storm.

Are you saying actually open the queen cage and let her go into the hive? Tell me more.

I was an interesting way of releasing the bees on a
Beemaster video. He carefully and so gently removed the entire screen on one side of the package. One gentle shake and they were all in hive in a moment- it looked a lot less stressful than all the shaking it takes to get them out that relatively small opening where the can fits.

Marie