Green Facts

. During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made

GoldStar Honey Bees

There are two good ways to start bees in top bar hives:

1) With a swarm. The beautiful thing about a swarm is that swarming is the natural reproduction process of honeybees. That means that the bees in a swarm are a finely tuned, well organized "colony". The bees are the right ages for the tasks they will be performing in their new home when it is found, and they are all related to each other, and they are all related to their queen. This is about as close to natural as you could ask for - if you are willing to ignore the rude experience they had when they were knocked off the branch of a tree and carried off by a beekeeper, to be introduced into a man-made beehive.

A swarm's ability to build wax and fill your top bar hive with honeycomb is just amazing!

The difficulty with starting your hive with a swarm is that you cannot predict its arrival time - or even if a swarm will come your way at all.

2) With a package. A package of bees has not had the best time of it just before they come to live in your beehive. They are bees of random ages, tumbled together with bees from many other hives in an apiary - they are unrelated, disorganized, and expected to get on with an artificially raised queen that they have never met before. This is a bit further from natural than one could ask for. It does however, have the advantage of being something you can "order", with an expectation as to an approximate arrival date.

It's an artificial process and not so good for bees, but they seem to be able to adapt and overcome, and organize themselves into a colony and go forward.

We are sold out of package bees for 2011.

So - with those options before you - you'll need to make some choices. Swarm or Package?