Lesson #1

Well dear friends,
It took me a whole two days to make my first giant mistake.  So after my last post, the girls were settled in and getting comfty in their new home.  They had food and water and everything seemed to be going swimmingly.

The next day I removed the little box with the queen in it and swapped out the cork in the box with a marshmallow (yup, a marshmallow), and placed her back in the hive, still in her box.  This allows the worker bees to eat away the marshmallow and release the queen into the hive.  So that all went well.

Two days after that I went to check on the girls to make sure that they had released their queen and check to see how much of the pollen patties they had eaten.  The two days that had passed had both been rainy and cold, so when I walked up to the hive and found about 200 dead bees around the hive I figured (after panicking) that it was the unexpected cold that had done it.  Buuuut, then I opened the hive and saw that all of the foundations of my frames had fallen out and were scattered helter skelter all through the hive, and were actually blocking the bees from getting down to the hive entrance to access their water! So now not only did I have a ton of dead bees, but now I had live bees building comb wherever they wanted....and I had to somehow reach in, grab all the foundations, figure out what I had done wrong, fix the frames, replace them, and work around the already settling in bees.  BUT the good news! They DID get their queen out of her box, AND they were at least doing well enough to start building comb!  They had started building comb, thankfully, on one of the foundationless frames.  So, I just happened to have enough extra synthetic frames to replace them all except the one frame that had comb on it already....I guess that one will just be a top bar haha.

So anyway, what happened is that I somehow missed the memo that if foundations don't come with wire already embedded into them, then you have to do it yourself....how did I miss this?  I thought they were quite flimsy, but never did it occur to me to by a magical electrical box that heats wire and spend an afternoon embedding wire into wax foundations (which apparently is what you are supposed to do).  So I didn't want synthetic frames, but thats what I had on hand and the fix had to be done quickly, so thats what is.  These work better because they are more rigid so they hold the weight of the bees and the comb.  Now I'm just hoping that my frames don't fall apart on me!

Anyway, checked on them again today, gave them a fresh pollen patty and all frames seem to be intact!!