Buckfast bees.

And there they are. Our new bees arrived on Tuesday evening. We got them from R Weaver Apiarys in Texas. https://www.rweaver.com/ who uses 2 day air with UPS to get them to you in good condition. And good condition it was. Generally you should be pretty please with just a hundred or so bees that died during the trip, and you can see in the pic that only about 20 are there on the bottom. Shippers used to use a can of liquid syrup in the top of the bee box to ship, but current shipping regulations prohibit that (it's messy) so they use that sugar you see in the bottom. It seems to work just fine. I think we'll hold onto the bee box just in case I end up finding a swarm somewhere.

That's a 3 pound package of bees with a mated and marked Buckfast Queen. This will be our 4th try at hiving. We've had a number of episodes of this, all ending with an empty hive. The first try was 2 hives with Carnolian and Italian bees, one in each hive box. The wind blew them over even though they were staked and strapped down.

We moved the hives, but the damage was kinda done at that point.

Then we tried some "Valley Survivors" from a local bee keeper. They didn't over winter. Probably because they swarmed in July, taking most of the stores with them and leaving the bees that stayed with a deficit.

Next was a volunteer hive that moved into the empty boxes, they didn't move in fast enough to build enough winter stores and didn't make it either.

Last year we tried more Italians from Murdocks in Salida. I think the queen died early and I wasn't a good enough bee keeper to figure it out (hence the marked queen this time around).

My friend at work, the mechanic, (Brad) has been a bee keeper for much of his life and he's had the same struggles here in the valley. Last year he tried these Buckfast bees and they overwintered and did just fine. Didn't swarm either. They were so productive that this year he just ordered another queen and is splitting the hives so he'll have 2.

We'll hope for that as well. 2 seems like a pretty good number to go for, especially with the queens starting in different years. Buckfast queens seem to be productive for about 2 years and you then change them out.

So we'll see how they do. The morning after hiving them the hive was buzzy and busy. We'll keep feeding them starter sugar water and pollen packs for a couple weeks to a month then add another big super for them to keep building into. Next Tuesday we'll open the hive and see how they're doing. We'll practice more hands-on management this time around. We paid about twice as much for this hive, I'm really hoping it turns out well.