Missing Willow Farm

We picked up two packages of bees today about a 90 minute drive from here.  They rode home in the back seat of our car.  All 24,000 of them.  Packaged bees come with a can of sugar water with three little holes punched in the bottom for the bees to eat en route and a queen cage that has the queen plus a few worker bees who attend to her.  The queen cage has a plug of ‘candy’ at one end, contained by a cork plug.  We remove the cork plug and place the queen cage in the hive.  It takes the bees between 1 and 2 days to eat away the candy to release the queen into the hive.   Once the queen’s cage is hung in the hive, we dump in the packaged bees.  The feeder gets place on top with a pollen patty on one side and about a half gallon of homemade sugar syrup on the other before enclosing the entire thing.  Fingers crossed, we’ll get gallons and gallons of honey this summer!