It is early, but Adam at AZapiaries.com has posted the spring schedule for bees. The bees delivery, stopping by the Palisades Mall in West Nyack, is always the earliest date so I can expect to get my 5 packages of bees on or about April 8, 2012.

The bees never arrive on time due to weather. There has to be a month of good weather in Georgia for the Wilbanks Apiary to grow enough bees to make the packages. They are often two or three weeks late.

The price did not go up. It’s $95 a package plus tax. That should be about $500, plus I ordered 3 queens so I could make splits. This will be just shy of $600. Beekeeping is expensive. If I don’t make any money this year it will be my last year.

Over the winter I will be studying up on Queen Rearing, and I will make various NUC boxes and queen castles out of plywood when the weather permits. I can sell queens for about $35 each and I hope to be able to sell a dozen or so every month. Selling queens makes more money than selling honey ($500 a month), I’ve heard. Queen rearing is an arcane science and I am trying to learn its secrets.

Now is the time to order your bees for the Spring.

I ordered 5 packages from Adam at AZ Apiaries. Adam and his crew stop by the West Nyack Mall in Early April, around 3AM. A couple of dozen beekeepers sit in their cars (usually in the rain) waiting for him. The thing to remember about ordering bees as that no matter what date Adam gives you, the bees will be late. The weather in Georgia controls when the queens will be ready and the population is built up enough to make packages.

Adam gets his bees from Wilbanks Apiary in Georgia, and the are very strong packages and do very well. These are the best bees that I’ve ever bought.

5 packages  is about $450 worth of bees at $90 a package. It may even be more this year. I figure that I will need three or four of them. If I have any left over I will sell them on Craigslist, or maybe even eBay. I’ll know how the bees are doing in March. Right now it doesn’t look good for three of them. I already lost my second hive this fall.

I have also ordered some queens and I will make nukes, either by borrowing bees from a good hive, or taking a few thousand bees from each of the packages.

All in all, I will have 5 or 6 hives and a few nukes. I will sell the nukes when they get established and any of the packages that I don’t use, so I have to see the $500 as an investment.

Last year, the two packages that I got from Adam were so strong that I got 40 pounds of Honey from each of them. I got no honey from the nucs that I bought in NJ. One nuc died and the other doesn’t look good. Connie, my Russian hive is hanging in there. She seems light, but Russians go into the winter light and still come on strong in the Spring when I start feeding. She struggled all Summer so I only took one super of honey, about 10 pounds, from her.

The shed where I store bee stuff was hit by a huge limb in the last storm. It is crushed and leaning over. Erica put in the insurance claim and we will have a new shed built back by the bees. Two hives are very near the shed, I have to move them so they will have room to work. I need to buy some straps to hold the hives together so they will not break apart when I move them. I moved a hive once and it was a nightmare. You can’t move an active hive because the bees remember where the hive was and can’t find it at the new location. I was scooping up piles of bees at the old location and putting them in the moved hive every night for a week. I must have lost thousands of bees. In the winter the bees are not leaving the hive so they can be moved without worry.