Installing the Bees at Stonehurst Place Inn

Last night I picked up the two nucs for the Stonehurst Place Inn.  I got the bees from Jerry Wallace who took great care to make this go so smoothly for his customers.  He even put my nucs in the car for me.

I drove to the inn and set the boxes up behind the cottage at Stonehurst.  I wanted everything to be in place before the installation today.  Caroline, the innkeeper, mixed up sugar syrup for the bees.  Gary, her husband, carefully built and painted all the boxes and nailed each frame.

We set the hives on old brick and Gary made sure the hives were level:

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I set the nucs on top of the boxes into which they would be placed this morning.

The bees peeked out of the newly opened front door as they waited for today's installation.

Today each deep box got the five frames from its nuc and I filled the rest of the box with deep frames from my stash.

Then I put the frames from the nuc into the hive in the exact position each frame was in in the nuc.

I saw the queen in each of the hives, which gave me a really good feeling about our impending success.  The tulip poplar was blooming in the yard and I stepped on fallen blooms as I moved to the hives.  This could be a really great location, with good blooming plants in the inn's yard and the Atlanta Botanical Garden just over the next street.

I fed each of these hives with a baggie feeder over the inner cover; left the nuc boxes in front of the hives to allow any errant bees to make their way into the hives and left.  I hope they do well.