The bees were in place for about a week when I opened the hives for the first time since my awkward installing of the nucs.

The weather was ok - no rain for once but the temperature was only about 50 degrees F.

I started with Artemis - her colony seems to be less twitchey than Demeter.  I got the smoker to really go and I put my hat and veil on first and then my jacket so the veil was neatly tucked in.  I did not forget to tuck my jeans cuffs into my socks this time!

I smoked the entry and then carefully lifted the cover and smoked the bees a bit more.  No irritated buzzing - just a nice hum.  I took off the lid and put it down on the ground.  I took out one of the frames on the outside of the hive. The outside frames are brand new ones that did not come with the nuc so there is no bee activity on them yet.  Then, using my hive tool, I pried loose some frames that had bees on them.  Bees every where!  Hundreds of them on each side of the foundation!  Humming nicely, they didn't get very excited at all.  I looked at each frame of bees and was lucky to find the queen!  She is marked with a blue dot, indicating that she hatched in 2010, and you can see her in the photograph!  So good to see her looking healthy.

I put Artemis back together and then turned to Demeter.  Same procedure.  Demeter seems to have more bees than Artemis and the bees seem to be a bit more energetic.  Happy humming here, also.  I looked for the queen but did not find her.  My mission this day was to give the bees some food so I didn't look for the queen for too long.

There seems to be some debate as to whether feeding bees with sugar syrup is a good idea or not.  As I don't really know what I'm doing I'm following Gary's instructions and will be feeding up the bees while they get used to their new surroundings.

I bought a product called "Honey B Healthy" from Ruhl Bee Supply in Oregon.  It contains spearmint and lemongrass oils which are supposed to attract the bees to the food and give them some extra energy - kind of like vitamins.  It smells really good and I had a tiny taste - tastes good too.  If I were a bee I'd like it!  Some of this is added to a homemade sugar syrup.  Gary recommended putting about 3 quarts of the solution in a 1 gallon ziplock bag and placing this on top of the bars inside the hive.  To feed this way a spacer has to be placed between the hive body and the cover to allow enough room for the bees to climb up onto the baggie so they can drink up the syrup through little holes you make in the top of the baggie.