Yesterday, I picked up my first hive of bees from Tom Fifer, a local bee master in Varina. From a Nuc, he transferred 4 frames of bees into my hive and showed me the queen with a green dot on her thorax. We left my Hive at his house until around 8 pm (when all of the bees had presumably returned home from foraging.)

I strapped the whole thing together with a ratchet and taped some hardware cloth in the entrance before I transported them back to my house (Heather accompanied me on the trip back to our house.)

Today, I got up to watch them and noticed only a little activity. The bees were coming and going in ones and twos; no guard bees were evident (by me, anyway) and several seemed to be scanning the hive sides on occasion.

Later, around 2:30 pm, I returned from a civic event to see much more activity. Workers were coming in and out at a rate of four or five every few seconds. They were definitely ‘making hay’ and I was encouraged. There was still no real evidence of guard bees. Either they were flying about the entrance or my hive has not gotten organized enough in these early days to have some bees to fill out those posts! I might open them up and take a look tomorrow.