After months of prepping, my bees were finally scheduled to arrive. I got a notice from my supplier that my package bees (two boxed colonies of about 10,000 bees + a queen each) was shipped on Monday, April 26.
Every day I monitored the UPS tracking. They were scheduled to arrive on Tuesday. Excellent! I made gallons of sugar syrup and pollen patties. Then an update arrived. Wednesday, between 10:15 and 2:15. Okay, I stored the syrup and refrigerated the cakes. But they didn’t arrive Wednesday, either.
At that point, I started to worry. Wednesday had been unseasonably warm—nearly 90 degrees (32 C) and I knew the bees would have to subsist on syrup. I waited for a delivery update, and got bad news that afternoon: the bees would be delivered on Thursday morning.
I was excited—I set up the apiary aired out my bee suit and watched the progress of the UPS truck on an app. The driver started near my house (about a mile away), then routed to neighborhoods a bit farther. The first notice said to expect delivery between 10:15 and 12:15PM, then updates pushed delivery back to 3:15PM. At 3, I saw the UPS truck tracking down a street a block a way. I suited up and stood in my driveway, waiting.
At 3:20, the UPS truck chugged down my driveway. The driver smiled as he dug the bee packages out of the back of the truck. When he handed to me, my heart sank. “They’re dead,” I said. The UPS driver looked confused.
“They’re dead. All of them,” I said as he climbed back into the truck and drove away.
Well, not all. One bee of the 20,000 survived. I let her go. Both queens were dried up husks in their queen cages. I was bummed.
I texted my mentor, who was expecting 30 packages from the same company. I assumed that I had particularly bad luck, but when he responded he told me all but 3 colonies arrived dead in his shipment. Between the two of us, that was almost 300,000 dead bees.
I called and emailed the company. They were extremely apologetic and processed my refund. But they could not offer me the one thing I wanted: replacement bees.
All of the work that I’d done over the last two months might have been for nothing. I felt bereft, like an expectant mother with a nursery and no baby.
I started to visit the Facebook page of Northern Virginia Beekeepers. I had joined in 2019 and knew there were local beekeepers who sometimes sold extra colonies. I found two who had bees ready to go.
I spoke at length with both of them—experienced beekeepers who had multiple state-certified healthy hives. I learned that the benefit of starting with a nuc (five frames of bees) over a package is that the bees are established. They come with five frames of comb, eggs, larvae and capped brood, and even a little honey.
The following Saturday (May 1) my husband I and drove an hour south to pick up our nucs. We suited up with Roy the beekeeper and went into the hives, pulling out frames, identifying the queen, and boxing up the bees. Ken and I drove home with two sealed boxes of bees buzzing behind the front seat.
At home, we suited up again, started the smoker and moved the bees into their permanent hives in our little apiarty. And in the intervening 3 weeks things have moved quickly. I’ve named the hives after their Queens: the first, Queen Latifah’s colony, was smaller from the start and is growing nicely. The second larger hive, Queen Noor’s colony, was about 50% larger from the start and has already built up two deep boxes (total 20 frames) with comb, brood and amazingly, honey. Last night I topped Noor’s hive with two honey supers.
While the initial bee shipment was a disaster for the bees and the company who shipped them, I’m actually glad I ended up with nucs to start my apiary. The bees and their queens are young, have already survived a winter, and are much further along than the packaged bees would have been.
It turns out our backyard is ideal for honeybees. We live in a subdivision, but our lot backs up into parkland and about nine acres of trees, many tulip poplars, and beyond that is the Colonial Pipeline right-of-way. That’s full of wildflowers, wild raspberries and blackberries. Both are outstanding because they are pesticide-free flowering trees and plants.
Now that the bees are settled in, I go down to visit several times a day. I love opening the hive for inspections, but it’s not good to mess with the bees too often. I find it meditative to observe the activity at the hive opening and watch them come and go.
I’m content, and I think the bees are, too.
My heart broke for you and your misfortune. I am glad you were able to locate the nucs and that they are thriving. I read Thomas Seeley's " Honeybee Democracy" last weekend and am now imagining you preparing for your first swarm, next spring.