New Hive - we Call It "π"

Carol's first hive over-wintered so well that we decided to try another hive of bees this spring.  We drove over to Harford County and picked up a small wire cage (will show drawing of same later) that contained about 10,000 thousand bees clustered about a can of sugar syrup and a small container cage with the queen and a few attendant workers.  It was late in the evening and fairly cold and raw outside when we arrived home so we kept the package intact in a small cool room in the house overnight.  As luck would have it the following day also was cold with misty rain but we decided to move the 'cluster' and queen into their new home rather than keeping them confined in the delivery package any longer.  Since this was to be 'my' hive I was going to be the one doing the dumping of those 10 to 11 thousand bees into the hive while Carol looked on giving advice and back-up. 
Although I had read the directions over and Carol was giving me directions as I proceeded, I klutzed it up fairly quickly by dropping the queen container into the pile of bees that I had dumped into the open hive body.  Luckily I had read earlier that if this happened there was no choice but to reach into the bees and retrieve the queen container.  The weather conditions - cold and misty - were making the bees fairly unhappy but I reached into the pile and gently lifted out the queen cage and rehung it between two of the hanging frames.  Then I started replacing the five frames that I had removed to make room for the incoming bees, and all of these movings have to be gentle even though many hundreds of those thousands of bees are flying about you everywhere. 
My first sting was a bee moving up my ankle under my jeans (now I knew why Carol had rubber-banded her suit legs) then one on my left hand, then one on my right, then one up my pant leg on my knee - and Carol also got several stings - I believe I go about five stings in total but they were not bad at all and not that many considering my klutziness and the weather.  Carol's stings on her hands gave her a good bit of pain and discomfort through out the remainder of the day.  But overall, the homing of our new bees seemed to go well and they were drinking the feeding syrup that we supplied and flying about in profusion in yesterdays sunny balmy weather.

a short p.s.  Carol said that when we get our next batch of bees that she would be the one moving them into the hive as she had had no trouble at all with her hive.  So true.
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