04-27-12 New kids on the block

Early this morning, I was on my way to New Hope Church Rd on the other side of Chapel Hill to go pick up my new bees. The place was busy with a truckload of bee packages ready to be picked up by people of all ages, looks and shapes.
A package that looks like this:

Packaged bees

Package sitting on top of their new home. The green container is filled with sugar water as they need some help feeding until they fill enough cells with honey to sustain themselves..

has about three thousand worker bees, and a queen in a separate mini cage that looks like this:

A queen and some servants in her own little quarters. The blueish stuff on the right is the candy gate that her workers have to eat through to open her exit and free her.

The queen remains captive for a couple three days after the workers have been freed to give them all time to get accustomed to her scent. If she was introduced to the hive right away, they would commit regicide since they would have no good way to know she was not an invader. While she sits in her mini cage with her workers slowly freeing her through eating of a candy "gate", the workers start drawing combs, gather pollen and store honey. As soon as she is free, the queen will start laying her eggs (only she does; female workers have not been mated) in the drawn cells and workers follow her capping those cells and nursing the next generation. The whole thing is highly organized, most probably because there is no male in the hive to distract them from their tasks, no TV and no FB.

Right now, air traffic over the garden has greatly increased while the pollen gatherers are trying to orient themselves in their new surroundings. By tomorrow, I am sure things will quiet down quite a bit.

Let me outta here!!!