I received my 3 (3)-lb packages on Friday and the weather wasn't favorable at all. Rainy and cold. I kept them inside and sprayed them with sugar water a few times until Saturday. Saturday wasn't much better but it wasn't raining at least. It was 47 or so degrees when I had a little window of no rain, but a fairly stiff cold wind. Here is what I did to get them in the hives...I'm looking for any feedback as to what I could have done better given these unfavorable conditions in the event I find myself in this situation again in the future.
I had the hives all set up. Each hive had a gallon of syrup in a frame-type feeder. The rest of the space in the deeps was filled with drawn comb from my deadout in February.
I pre-placed an extra deep hive body next to each hive. I took the first package from the house with a towel draping over the box to keep the wind from hitting the bees directly. Once I had walked back to the bee yard I set the box inside the empty deep on the ground next to the hive and removed the towel. My theory was that having them sit inside the empty deep on the ground would keep that chilly wind off of them. I banged the box down a couple times to get the bees to fall to the bottom of the box. I then removed the queen cage after removing the syrup can. All of the queens looked good, but I was surprised that there were no workers inside with the queen. A board was slid over the hole to keep the bees inside. Working really quickly I removed the cork from the queen cage and replaced it with a little marshmallow. I rubber banded the queen cage to a frame two over from the feeder. I then picked up the empty deep and placed it on top of the main hive body. I put two boards across the frames inside and then removed the board from the hole on the cage and just put the bees upside down on top of the frames. I put the covers on and walked away until today.
When I hived them like this I think it really minimized the loss of bees due to the chill. I think only about 75 or so bees from each package escaped. They were flying but dropping close around the hives. I'm not sure if they made it back or not.
The syrup cans were close to being empty so I'm glad I didn't wait until today.
Today when I went back to check on them it was fairly nice. About 55 with bright sun and no breeze. All 3 hives had bees flying about and it seemed like a lot of orientation flights were taking place. I opened up each hive and took out the package box and checked to see if the queen had been released. 2 of the 3 were released so I removed those queen cages. The third was close to being released. The bees were working the drawn comb like crazy but they weren't taking syrup which surprised me a little. The drawn comb that I put in had some capped honey in spots so maybe they were eating that first. I put half a pollen patty on each and closed them up.
I didn't spray the bees down before hiving them thinking that it would just chill them too much with the cold and windy weather.
If anyone has any feedback I'd appreciate it.
Perfect!
Scott
Sounds like a good installation if you ask me. Nice job