How to Install a Package of Bees, Step by Step

A package is bees sold by the pound, and the standard unit is a 3-pound package: roughly 10,000 worker bees scooped from strong production colonies, a mated queen in her own small cage with a few attendant bees, and a can of sugar syrup to feed everyone in transit. The whole thing ships or rides home in a screened box about the size of a shoebox, and the hum coming off it in your back seat is a sound you will remember for years.

The detail that shapes everything on install day: the queen is not related to the workers. Package producers shake bees from several colonies and add a queen raised separately, so on day one she is a stranger the colony would likely kill if she were dropped loose among them. The cage is her protection during the introduction period, and the candy plug in its end is the timer that releases her only after the colony has had a few days to accept her pheromone. University extension programs like Penn State's Beekeeping 101 teach this same slow-release logic, and it is the single most important thing to not improvise on.

A package also starts with nothing: no drawn comb for the queen to lay in, no stores, no brood to anchor the bees to the box. That is why packages run three to four weeks behind a nucleus colony, and why the two jobs after installation are feeding heavily and leaving them alone. If you have not committed to a format yet, our where to buy bees guide compares packages, nucs, swarms, and splits with honest pricing, and the nuc install guide shows the gentler alternative.

Everything about install day gets easier if the apiary is finished before the bees exist. The hive should be fully assembled, painted or coated and aired out, and sitting level on its stand at its permanent location. You want a single deep brood box with all ten frames in it, an entrance reducer set to its smallest opening, and covers on. A complete kit like the Honey Lake 10-Frame Langstroth starter kit ($159.99) covers the woodenware list in one purchase, with frames and foundation included and a beeswax coating that skips the painting weekend; the full field of options is ranked in our starter kit guide.

Stage the consumables too. Mix a batch of 1:1 sugar syrup (equal parts white sugar and water, by weight or volume) and load some into a clean spray bottle that has never held chemicals. Fill your feeder and have it at the hive, not in the kitchen. Lay out your hive tool, a pushpin or small nail for the candy plug step, and a rubber band or queen-cage holder if your cage style needs one. Then dress for success: install day is a fine day for full protection while your hands learn, and a ventilated jacket like the USKEEPERS 3-layer ventilated bee jacket ($79.99) is the sweet spot of coverage and mobility for a job done mostly from above. More options in jackets and gloves.

Most packages are picked up in person on a scheduled day, and the pickup yard is controlled chaos: hundreds of humming boxes, a line of trucks, and someone with a clipboard. When you collect yours, look before you leave. A healthy package has a tight, calm cluster hanging together with at most a small scattering of dead bees on the floor of the cage; a layer of dead bees more than a bee or two deep is worth flagging to the supplier on the spot. Check that the queen cage is visible and that she is alive and moving.

Transport the package in the passenger compartment, not a hot trunk, out of direct sun and away from the heater vents. Bees in transit die of heat, not cold: a cool, ventilated, slightly boring ride is perfect, and a towel under the box keeps stragglers off the upholstery. Do not stop for a long lunch with the package in a parked car. If the drive is long and the day warm, a light misting of water through the screen at a rest stop cools and calms them.

Plan to install the same day if you possibly can, in the late afternoon or early evening. Installing near dusk means the bees settle into the hive, find the feeder, and cluster for the night instead of taking orientation flights into the sunset and drifting to your neighbor's yard.

Weather happens. A package can be held for a day or two, sometimes three, with minimal losses if you keep it cool, dark, and fed. Put the box in a garage or basement at roughly 50 to 70 degrees, dim, and out of drafts. Twice a day, mist the screen lightly with 1:1 syrup, a few passes, not a soaking; the bees will strip the droplets off the screen and each other. The shipping syrup can is usually running low by the time you get the package, so this misting is genuinely feeding them, not just a courtesy.

What you are protecting during a hold is the queen and the cluster's energy. Every day in the cage costs stores and bees, so hold only as long as the weather forces you to. A cool, drizzly install beats a third day in the garage: bees can be installed in surprisingly marginal weather as long as it is above roughly 50 degrees and not pouring, because the cluster keeps itself warm once it is in the box. What you should not do is open the package indoors to check on things. It is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds.

Just before you open anything, give the package a light spray of 1:1 syrup through the screen: three or four passes on each screened side, until the bees glisten slightly. Wait a minute. What happens next is the whole trick of package installation: the bees stop flying-minded and start grooming, licking syrup off themselves and each other, and a cluster busy eating is a cluster that pours like damp popcorn instead of exploding like confetti.

Keep the spray light. You want misted bees, not soaked bees; a drenched cluster chills easily and drowning bees in syrup helps no one. Skip the spray entirely in cold weather, below roughly 55 degrees, when wet bees cannot warm themselves, and shake the extra flight out of them with the thump described below instead. On a normal spring afternoon, though, the spray is the difference between the calm installs you see in videos and the swirling clouds beginners fear.

Set the package on end next to the hive. Pry off the thin wooden or plastic lid covering the syrup can; under it you will find the top of the can and, hanging beside it, a strap or tab holding the queen cage. Here is the sequence that avoids the classic beginner fumble: give the package one firm thump on the ground so the cluster drops in a heap to the bottom, then lift out the syrup can, immediately fish out the queen cage by its strap, and set the lid loosely back over the hole. The thump buys you several seconds of open hole with almost no bees boiling out, and the loose lid keeps it that way while you work.

Now look at the queen. She is the long-bodied bee in the small cage, usually with a few attendants. Confirm she is alive and walking; a dead queen on arrival is rare and every reputable supplier replaces one, but you need to know before the bees are in the box. Brush or gently shake the clinging workers off the cage, back toward the package. Then find the candy end: one end of the cage is plugged with a cork or cap over white sugar candy. Remove the cork from the candy end only, and if the candy looks rock-hard, pierce it once with a pushpin, not all the way through, to give the bees a start. The cork on the opposite end stays put forever; pulling the wrong cork releases the queen instantly into a colony that does not know her yet.

The queen cage goes into the middle of the action, between the center frames of the brood box, candy end up. Candy-up matters for a mundane reason: if an attendant dies in the cage, she falls away from the exit instead of corking it shut with her body. Wedge the cage between the top bars of frames four and five, screen face exposed to the gap so workers can reach the queen to feed her and take her pheromone, or strap it to a frame face with a rubber band. It should hang snug enough that it cannot fall to the floor of the hive.

Pull one frame from the edge of the box and set it aside before you do this, so there is room to work and, in the shake-in method, room for the pour. What you are building is a target: an open slot in the middle of the box with the queen hanging beside it, so the bees you pour land near her, smell her, and start organizing around her within minutes. The colony that clusters on the queen cage tonight is a colony that has already decided to stay.

The classic install, taught in nearly every beginner class, and faster than your pulse says it will be. With two or three center frames out of the brood box to make a gap, pick up the package, pull the lid fully off the syrup hole, invert the package over the gap, and pour. Shake firmly, side to side and up and down; the cluster slides out in ropes and heaps into the hive. Pause, thump the package on your palm to drop the stragglers, and shake again. Getting 90 percent of the bees out is success; chasing the last few hundred is not required.

Set the nearly empty package on the ground in front of the hive, hole facing the entrance, and the remainder will walk in over the next hours, drawn by the queen's scent. Now the gentle part: ease the removed frames back into the box, lowering them slowly so bees flow out of the way rather than getting crushed, until all frames are home and correctly spaced around the hanging queen cage. Bees give way to slow steady pressure; they cannot give way to a dropped frame.

Add your feeder, close the hive up, and confirm the entrance reducer is at its smallest opening. You are done, and the entire pour-to-closed sequence took less time than reading this section. Walk away and let ten thousand bees introduce themselves to their new address.

The walk-in trades speed for serenity, and it is a legitimate choice, not a beginner's cop-out. Instead of pouring, you remove four or five frames from one side of the brood box, set the whole package down in the cavity with its top hole open, hang the queen cage beside it as usual, and close the hive over everything. The bees walk out of the package and onto the frames on their own schedule, usually overnight, gathered around the queen by morning.

Come back the next day or the day after, lift out the empty package box, gently slide the missing frames back into place, and close up. The costs are minor but real: your hive runs a day or two short on frames (bees sometimes begin free-form comb in the open space if you dawdle, so do not leave the box in past day two), and you make one extra visit. The benefit is that nobody pours anything, which for some new beekeepers is the difference between an install that happens this week and one that gets postponed twice.

A package on bare foundation is a construction crew with no lumber, and syrup is the lumber. Bees convert nectar or syrup into beeswax at a steep exchange rate, several pounds of syrup per pound of comb, and until comb exists the queen cannot lay a single egg. So the feeder goes on at install and stays full for weeks: 1:1 syrup, refilled before it runs dry, until the brood box is mostly drawn comb or a strong natural flow makes the bees ignore the feeder. For a package that typically means four to eight weeks of steady feeding, and the colonies that get it draw comb at double the pace of the ones that get syrup when their keeper remembers.

Feeder choice is mostly about refill disturbance and robbing risk. An entrance feeder like the Foxhound Bee Co half-gallon entrance feeder ($33.99) is the friction-free option for a new package: the jar sits outside the hive where you can see the syrup level from across the yard and swap jars in ten seconds without opening anything, which is exactly the level of intrusion a settling colony wants. Its known weakness, inviting robbers in a dearth, is at its lowest in spring when packages are installed; once robbing season arrives, or if you run more than a couple of hives, a top feeder carries more syrup with less exposure. The full comparison, including our top-feeder pick, is in the bee feeder guide.

Two feeding rules that save packages: never let the feeder sit dry during comb-building, because a hungry package is the classic absconding setup, and never spill syrup around the hive at refill time, because nothing draws robbers and ants faster. Refill in the evening if you can.

Three to five days after install, make one short, surgical visit: is the queen out of her cage? Suit up, use little or no smoke, open the top, and lift out the cage. If it is empty, perfect. Remove it entirely, push the frames back together to close the gap it occupied, and close up. Leaving the empty cage in the hive earns you a wad of burr comb built around it and nothing else.

If the queen is still in the cage at day 5, the candy was too hard or too deep. You have two sane options: pierce the remaining candy with a pin so the workers finish the job within hours, or release her directly, and direct release is safe by now if the workers on the cage are calm. The tell is body language: workers feeding her through the screen and walking calmly on the cage means she is accepted, so open the non-candy end and let her walk down between the frames. Workers biting the screen and clinging aggressively mean the colony has not accepted her yet; re-hang the cage and check again in two days.

Resist the urge to turn this visit into an inspection. No frame-by-frame review, no hunting for the queen in the crowd, no rearranging. In and out in five minutes; the colony is mid-introduction and every extra disturbance risks the acceptance you are trying to protect.

A week to ten days after install, do your first true inspection, and go in looking for one thing above all: eggs. Single eggs standing in cell bottoms, one per cell, like grains of rice on end, are the proof that the queen is out, alive, mated, and working. You do not need to find the queen herself, and as a beginner you often will not; eggs mean she was on that comb within the last three days, which is all the confirmation that matters. Expect two to four frames with some drawn comb, a patch of eggs and maybe young larvae at the center, and syrup being stored around the edges.

While you are in, read the rest quickly: comb being drawn straight on the foundation (correct any crooked early comb now by pushing frames tight together), syrup stores accumulating, and a laying pattern that is filling in. Then close up and get back on a 7-to-10-day rhythm. The full skill of reading frames, brood patterns, and warning signs is its own craft, and we teach it start to finish in how to do a hive inspection, with the weekly cadence mapped in the first-year calendar.

Dead queen in the cage. Rare, and every reputable supplier replaces her free if you report it promptly. Install the package anyway; a queenless package holds together for days on the cage's residual pheromone, and the replacement queen goes in the same way. Absconding. A package that vanishes in week one almost always left because of an empty feeder, a reeking brand-new hive (air out strong coatings before install), or constant disturbance. Feed continuously, and some keepers add a queen excluder under the brood box for the first week as cheap insurance; once there is brood in the comb, the colony is anchored and the excluder comes off.

Bees clustered outside the hive after install. Usually harmless orientation and crowding on a warm evening; they move in by morning. Crooked comb. Caught at the first inspection, fixable in seconds by nudging frames tight together and rotating the offending frame; caught a month later, it is a demolition job. This is why frames go back tight and centered on install day. Laying workers. The late-stage sign of a colony queenless for weeks, multiple eggs per cell laid on cell walls, and by far the hardest fix on this list, which is exactly why the day 7-10 egg check exists: it catches queen failure while the fix is still easy.

Zoom out and the failure modes share one shape: a package fails from too little food or too little patience. National surveys tracked by the Bee Informed Partnership put annual colony losses near 40 to 50 percent, and new-keeper losses trend worse, but almost none of that happens on install day. Feed them, check the release, confirm eggs, then manage them like any colony: the inspection rhythm, the varroa monitoring covered in when to treat for varroa, and the season plan in the first-year guide.