No it isn't because we woke up to snow the other morning, although that would be fitting if it were December. Santa gave me three nuc hives for Christmas and we are getting closer to the delivery date. The anticipation of getting the bees feels just like Christmas. I waited a little too long to order the wooden ware for the hives, but Western Bee Supply was great to work with and got me the order. Not only did they have great prices (best I could find for a hobbyist), but were great to work with and I was really impressed with their quality. If I get a chance, I will post a video on how to assemble a frame and foundation. I still have about thirty to put together.
I decided to make a request to Santa to get the nucs from two different vendors. They both seemed really good and the price was similar, but I wanted to see which one works out better. I bought one from Apis Hive in Grand Junction, CO which has a Carniolan Queen and two from Harvest Lane in Grantsville, UT which will be a mix between Carniolan and Italian that they like to call the Utah Bee. Our current Queen is an Italian, so we should have a pretty good sample of Bees.
The original pick up date was April 9th with Harvest Lane, but because of the bad weather in CA they wont be ready until the 30th. Apis Hive will also be available for pick up on the 30th. Should be a fun day. If things go well this year we hope to have a little extra honey to sell. An average hive usually gets an excess about 40-50 lbs, which would be 4-5 gallons of honey. You never know what to expect from the hives, but hopefully we get a good crop from last year's hive and get at least a little off of the three nuc hives. I have checked the hive once already and the girls made it through the winter. We started feeding them just to make sure we don't lose them. They have made it this far, I would hate to have a cold spring (like it has been) and loose them.
I learned there are a few ways to buy bees. One is a package of bees and these can even be shipped through the mail. This mimics a swarm of bees in a cage. You will have about 10K bees and a mated queen. You also can buy a nuc or nucleus of bees. These are usually for local pick up only as they are more difficult to ship. From what I have found, a standard nuc contains 4-5 frames of bees. Three frames with brood in all different stages and one frame of honey and another empty frame for expansion. Most nucs will have the queen in the box for 3-4 weeks to allow her to start laying eggs. This makes it so that the queen is already accepted and you shouldn't see a drop of of bee population since new bees will hatch as old bees die off. The final way is to buy an existing hive. This tends to be much more expensive, but you should get more honey the first year. We chose to try the nucs as it wasn't that much more than a package of bees and we hope to get more honey as the queen is already established. We will see how it goes.
Nature's Hive
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