The waiting is torture!!

It's been five days since I installed my package of bees. All of the bee books I read say that you need to wait seven days after installation before you do your first hive inspection. Five is less than seven. The waiting is torture!

I'd like nothing better than to get in there and see what those little workers have been up to. By now, they should have released the queen, started laying down honey comb, and maybe the queen started laying eggs. I've replaced the sugar syrup container on the top of the beehive (that didn't involve opening up the main area of the hive, just removing the top cover). No bees were disturbed except for about a dozen sitting on the lid of the sugar feeder, and they were not happy to be moved (it was early in the morning, the weather a little cold, and they were groggy).

Speaking of weather, we had a little cool snap the last few days. The temperature got above 50 F for a little while (50 is about the minimum for bees to fly), and Tracy reported that while I was at work, the bees were out and about (especially yesterday, when it was warmer). Today should be warm, so I can watch them doing their business.

I have the next week off as vacation, so I will wait the full seven days before I get into the hive (on Tuesday). If you disturb the bees too early, they may reject the new queen. At first, it is a rocky relationship between the hive and the queen, as they both get used to their new environment (imagine getting uprooted from your nice warm Georgia hive, get shoved with 10,000 of your siblings into a small box, put on a truck for a couple of days to MA, sit on a kitchen table for a day, then get shook into a totally new hive environment). As I want things to succeed, I'm going to wait the 7 days. It is sort of like this commercial from the 80's:



(Did we really dress like that in the 80's? Not me!!)