Way back in February of this year I made a post about adding bees to the homestead. Over the past few months, plans have been made and changed a few different times. We researched hive designs, settled on a few we liked and bought materials. We even made a few hive bodies. We cost wise it was definitely going to save us a few dollars per box and a few dollars does add up over time.During this time we also joined a lot of bee groups on Facebook. A few of these groups were buy, sale, trade pages for bee equipment. Late one evening the Wanderers momma found a post by a guy who had decided to sell out of the hobby, he was getting rid of everything, about 8 complete hives (no bees), a 6 frame extractor, smoker, suit, and tons of assorted beekeeping tools. Arrangements were made and the Wanderer and I loaded up the truck and took off early the next morning for North Carolina, a good 250 mile, 5 hour trip from our homestead in the hills of Kentucky. The man lives in the orchard area of North Carolina, a stone's throw from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, where most of his equipment came from. It took us almost an hour using our Tetris honed skills to load each item into the bed of the Dodge Dakota, but we made it fit. This was officially the trucks furthest trip from the homestead.
Looking over the hives we realized quickly why he lost all his bees, he had pretty serious mite and wax moth infestations. When we got everything home we took metal paint scrapers and cleaned each piece, then tossed them in a deep freezer to ensure that everything bad was killed off.
Now we just needed to find some bees. Did we want to go with packages, nucs, wild-caught swarms? We decided we needed help and guidance so we joined a local beekeepers club and found out that a member sold nucs, we put our order in for 2 nucs (nucleus colony).
We filmed our first bee install. Did I just say first? Yep. Because a week after we picked up nuc's 1 and 2 we decided we wanted a 3rd so we bought another nuc.Initially when we decided we wanted bees we thought we were going to put them up on the hill, somewhere near our barn. Then we started seeing so many people having great results with bug/mite management by allowing chickens to free range around their hives. We have placed our hives inside our chicken and duck lot.
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| Starting the smoker |
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| First Inspection |
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| Bees at the entrance |
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| The 3 Hives set up. |
