I am going to give you a nice overview of the whole process of starting a beehive. But just the what to do aspects of it. This tutorial isn't about what tools and hive stuff to buy. I have that tutorial here.

And an important thing here is that we do it in a way that is very gentle to the bees.

In this tutorial we actually get our bees and set up a hive. Pretty interesting stuff :)

Will wants to give a special thanks to Dee for all her hard work. She has been the motivator for getting the beehives up and running again! She is doing most of the work and we have set the bees up in her back yard. So, my thanks go to her for letting me participate in the fun. She is doing it because she loves bees!

Okay! The wooden box inside there with the screen on it is called a "Package". Inside there is three pounds of live bees! Yup. Three pounds of them. You order this from a bee supply company. For us here in New England our company has them delivered from a bee raising company down south and they arrive in Spring . They arrived here in our area on April 11th. So, you then go and pick up your Package.

And Inside this package is something called the Queens Cage. Inside this little cage is the queen.

This keeps her safe and allows the bees to get used to her pheremones and adopt her as their queen.

This is because of the way that bee raising companies work. They hatch queens en masse and then pair them up with bees in order to be shipped. This queen didn't actually lay these worker bees! But soon enough she will be doing a lot of that and these bees will take care of things. I

We are following a method of setting up hive written about in Grit Barnyard Series magazine. Vol 3 No. 3. Guide to Backyard Bees and Honey. Pages 42-44. Article titled: How to Install a Package of Bees .

This is a wonderful way to set up bees because it is very kind and gentle with the bees.

The parts of the hive we used:

• bottom board
• 2 deep boxes (aka deep supers, brood boxes)
• 1 medium box
• inner telescoping cover
• outer cover
• 9 frames

• hive tool
• pliers
• screw (should have used pocket knife)
• smoker

And here is how we are going to set it up. The Nuc is inside that bottom Deep box.

okay! Continue on and let's set the bees free and set up the hive!

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