BlueRidgeBee

If you have followed my previous blogs you know that I had one of my two hives die last year. I purchased a new package this year. There are two main ways to buy bees, either  a package or a nuke. A Nuke is four frames in a small hive box that has bees and queen already working on the frames producing brood and drawing out wax and such. Advantages are that you have a head start on production. Draw backs are that you may get some infestation with the frames. A Package comes in a little box that looks like a cage with about 3000 bees and a queen in a little cage. To install this you have you take a little cork out of the queen cage and place the queen cage between two frames in the middle of the hive. Then Dump the rest of the bees into the hive or take 4 frames out of the hive and put the opened package box into the hive over night and let them come out on their own. Every year they mark the queens with a differnet color this year it's blue. My wife doing the hard work o