Read Part 1 here of Adventures in Beekeeping.
About a week after we moved our bees to their new home we decided to open them and see how they were doing. My mom bought a jacket, hat, veil, gloves and tools but when we got to the hive that evening it they were really docile. So I decided to skipped the jacket and hat/veil and just opted with the gloves and tucked in my shirt Pee-Wee Herman style.
It was a little scary because I was so afraid to squish any of our bees. I finally got an end frame out so that it freed up the rest of the frames. I chose a middle frame remembering from class that bees create from the middle frames and move out. We were so excited to see a little cluster of honey filled cells and lots of brood cells! The bees really paid no attention to me at all.
My next goal was to find the queen, which looked impossible because we are such rookies that we still couldn’t really tell the difference between the three kinds of bees. It took awhile for me to find, and I also dropped a frame (yeah- not cool) but after all of that I found the queen! Which feels similar to finding Waldo- it is exciting!