Good comb leads to good comb

My friend Katja and I decided to get into bees. We went to a Suburban Self Sufficiency workshop and thought getting into beekeeping would be great. We saw our friend Spring at the workshop and she mentioned the Top Bar Hive. Many folks call it the Kenyon Top Bar Hive (KTBH), but it's actually not from Kenya, it's as old as the Greeks. Anyway, Katja's husband is a wood worker and he decided to make two TBHs. I wanted to order bees, wasn't sure when the hive would be done, so missed all the local dates. Note to self, when in doubt, poop or get off the pot. I could have ordered the local bees in January. I could have picked up a Langstroth hive if I was committed. I could have whined to my friend's husband to make sure sure sure I had the hive. I could have danced in the moonlight praying to Melissa. Whatever I would have done, I didn't. Then I felt awful when Chuck brought over a beautiful top bar hive with a viewing window and a perfect little entrance on one side, but it was too late for a swarm and too late for locally purchased bees. Maybe I should have found a way to let go of guilt, but I didn't. Katja and I attended a Pollinator Workshop at UC Davis and learned about hive collapse and what to do locally to support bees. I bought plants, hundreds of dollars worth of pollinator supporting plants, and planted them on my property. My mornings were spent observing bees, honey bees, sweat bees, carpenter bees, giant black bumble bees, and a few butterflies. I ordered books, borrowed books, and read online articles about bees. I looked in a 10 mile radius, then moved to larger circles scouring for bees. Everyone was out. I ended up feeling like an idiot for not ordering in January, especially after Chuck came through with a beautiful hive. I ordered from Draper's out in Pennsylvania. They still had bees. Draper's changed the dates on me to go further and further out into May. Eventually, I cancelled my order, but the same day I cancelled it, they sent me an email that the bees were already sent priority mail. It was a Friday. The following Thursday, after staying home for four days to greet the bees, thy arrived late Thursday. I called my friend Katja over to help me.

I set up the syrup, but forgot to put the ant trap stuff around the legs of the hive. I had ants everywhere. I opened the bees, shook them into the hive that I divided with the divider board, and was sad to see so many dead bees. I couldn't figure how to separate them, so I dumped them all in. The bottom was filled an inch or two thick with dead bees. It was carnage; a virtual killing field. About half way into dumping the bees, I realized that I had not taken out the queen cage. DOH. I didn't worry about it because I was going to direct release her. I plucked out the queen cage, shook off the bees and didn't see a thing inside. Empty? Upon closer inspection, the clipped, marked queen was curled like the question mark. The Queen is Dead. After all the reading, all the books, all the videos, I had no idea what to do. I dumped the bees in, saw the inches of dead in there and did nothing about it, then dumped the dead queen and put the cage in and tried to put on the lid. The bees seemed mad. I realized they were hungry. The can of sugar water was full, and after 6 days they were dehydrated and stressed. I made water available. I made sugar water and a patty of pollen substitute available. I put the lid on and came in the house to call Draper's. The best they could do was send me a new queen, not the queen type I ordered, and I would have to pay the darn overnight shipping. I did. Can I tell you I felt like the 6 days of high heat for those bees must have been hell. All I felt was discouragement and lot of regrets. At 5:30 the next day the new bees came. It was a small package with an unmarked queen and her attendants. I called my friend Keith and he came over with his gear, hive tool, and smoker. We got right to business. I removed the cork from the candy side. I inserted an earring through the top of the cage, made a loop, and threaded the loop through the hive bar and got her in the middle of the bar. When we opened the hive, it was full of a big, big, almost soccer size ball festooned on the bars by the door. There were more bees festooned in smaller arrangements on the bars moving away from the large clump. I hung her there. I probably should have hung her between the clumps. I didn't think of that then. It wasn't obvious if they were making comb, there were just too many clumped together to see what they were clumped on. However, I do know that good comb leads to more good comb in the same way that bad comb leads to more bad comb. For me, in this situation, I can see that my hasty decision to order bees late in the season through a far away distributer who extended the dates was my initial bad comb decision. The postal delays, the dead queen, the ant infestation, these were all iterations of bad comb decision. The bees are doing their best out there with what I have given them. I just hope I can learn a lot more before making more bad comb type decisions.