Two kilos of bees for me, please

Nobody weighs bees anyway, you might say, and you'd almost be right. Farmers can easily calculate how much their chickens or cows weigh, gardeners can easily "count" a kilo of potatoes by eye, but if a beekeeper asks you how much your bees weigh, it's more likely that you'll get a "are you okay?" question than a precise answer. Bees, like many good things, are mostly immeasurable: happiness is inexhaustible, love is endless, joy is boundless and bees are infinite. However, weigh me two kilograms of bees, please. Puzzled and intrigued? Great! We invite you to read on.

The magic two kilograms

Two kilos of bees for a new colony, just (even!) two kilos of bees and you're almost a beekeeper, two kilos of bees and honey - products for the whole year. Those two kilos of bees are magic! But where do they come from? You can believe you are a lucky baby and try to "hunt" bees one by one with Chinese chopsticks (like in "Kung-Fu Panda"), or you can do what beekeepers do - forage. Yes, yes, you read that right - but the sweeping should not be done in a farm-like manner, like a thistle, but in an elegant manner, like snowflakes. The beekeeping brothers recommend that you sweep at least 3-4 hives and only the frames on the top of the hive. This is conveniently done by removing Honey yields. Bees are, as the locals would say, "not dirty", smelling their own from a distance. To form a cohesive colony, the scent of bees from several different hives will mix together and the likelihood of a new queen being accepted increases significantly. It is therefore very important to take bees from several hives. The brothers sweep the bees into a special box brought back from Germany with many holes for the bees to breathe and ventilate, and a funnel. This makes it easier to transport the bees and to stack them in the hive in a respectful and safe way. The bees and the funnel should be sprayed liberally with water before sweeping - the bees will be less stressed and less likely to bite, and if their wings get wet, they will also be less volatile.

Sweeping some of the bees benefits both bees and beekeepers: particularly strong colonies tend to swarm during the heavy honey harvest, so sweeping some of the bees helps to preserve the honey crop and queen, and to safely and comfortably establish a new swarm in the honey fields.

It's not good to be homeless

Like every family, it needs a home that is well prepared and has everything: tasty and nutritious food, enough space, good air circulation and safe construction. And that's exactly the kind of apartment we create for them. There is no better home for bees than a clean, spacious hive. In a new hive, we seal the front entrance with varnish and prepare the secure structures - six nesting frames with wax plates that have not yet been sewn, a diaphragm, and a good fixing. To make the new home more welcoming, we add food at the bottom of the hive - 1.5 kg of kandi dough (a special dough made for feeding bees from Honey and sugar). We will soon be able to accommodate new mothers in apartments specially prepared for them.

A home is not a home if it does not have a mother, the main guarantor of the family's well-being, and a new queen must be placed in the hive. And not just any queen, but one that has already flown and reproduced. The queen's pheromone scent must be weakened to ensure that she is fully accepted by the bees and does not impose a death sentence. Again, the magical water we spray on Her Majesty's cage will do the trick. Congratulations, the final touch before the bees are housed is to place the queen's cage in the hive between the frames after the door has been cracked. Once the queen and her worker bees have broken through the dough, they will enter the hive and begin the process of building and strengthening the colony.

The plight of newcomers

A properly prepared hive does not guarantee a successful colony. Bees are very clever. They can find their way home from kilometres away, so it will take a bit of knowledge and ingenuity to make the new hive and the other worker bees a family. But first, we place the new queens in their new habitat. We give the bees, which have been swept up in a special box, a good shake and shake them into the hive and cover it with a breathing grid as soon as possible. This work is not for the slow of heart - once the bees are shaken, they will be scurrying towards their old home, so you need to be quick and precise, as too much haste can crush the bees, and working too slowly will cause them to fly away. Once this mission has been accomplished and all the winged worker bees have been housed, we finally strap the hive down for safe transport. It is useful to mark the queen's details on the sides of the hive: the line of origin, the year and the number.

And now it's time for a little trick. To prevent bees from flying away to their former home when you open the varnish, you'll need to erase their memory. Sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie? No, we're not going to use any magical device. In fact, we will use almost nothing. To help the bees get used to their new home and forget their old one, we will put the hive in a cool, dark place for 3-4 days. This period is also very important for a harmonious family relationship, as the bees will not only forget their previous home, but will also make friends with each other and the new queen. Although bees and cold seem to be incompatible, when the hive is crowded, the coolness will keep the bees from overheating and the darkness will mimic the night and not cause additional stress when trying to escape from the hive to the wooded fields.  

After this "memory cleaning", in the evening, we take the hive to its permanent place, unclog the varnish and treat those magical two kilograms of bees with organic medicines. A day later, we see that all is well in the hive: the bees are calm, the queen has been accepted, the combs are almost sewn. To reinforce the colony, we put a feeder on top of the hive and, in the evening, add 1 litre of sugar-water syrup (1:1). Congratulations! The colony is complete. From this day on, the queen will start laying eggs and will not stop until the end of her reign, and the bees will defend their new colony with their fragile little bodies like a wall. From this day on, they are all one and as one. And all dedicated to the sole purpose of rewarding the bees with good harvests and fresh honey. And all we can do is admire them once again and watch in awe as an insect weighing a few grams conquers the fields and our hearts with its small majesty to do what it was born to do.

You can't buy happiness, but you can buy bees

Bees and happiness. Happiness and bees. Perhaps, as beekeepers would say, they are one and the same. And you don't know, man, what it is about them that is so enchanting - the dedication to work, the sacrifice for the sake of the colony, the navigational map of the world that fits in a centimetre, or the fact that they lived long before us and will survive long after us.

 Just two kilos of bees and your home will always smell of honey. Just two kilos of bees and your garden will grow like never before. Just two kilograms and as many as 20 000 dancing tummies. Just two kilos of bees to start a colony and even two kilos of the extraordinary happiness of becoming a beekeeper. They say they are good people. They say bees bring peace and happiness into the home. So, weigh for me, please, two kilograms of bees.