Losing my voice in 26 days

I’ve started to record myself saying certain things – mainly to my dogs, today, as we were in and out working with some crazy bees and with transplants from the barn to the gardens.

The bee craziness is just plain weird. Both packages installed without issue, but the next day were both showing far more activity than they should have. It looked like some epic battling was going on in both. I know it couldn’t have been robbing, as they had nothing to rob.

I pulled the front feeder off both, put in an entrance reducer  on both, then put the feeder jars on top of the frames in the medium box. To cover the feeder, I put an empty deep box over them and closed them. A couple hours later, there was far less activity at the landing boards. Success!

Except: the next day, the first package (from this point on, noted as #1) and the second package (#2) were still being weird: both of them had bees lined up on the underside of the bottom boards. Because I use screened bottom boards, when they fan to distribute the queen’s pheromones, some of them were actually under the  hive.

What to do? Nothing to do except the (carefully) take apart the hive and clear the bottom of the boards of dead bees and shake the bees into their home (again).

Next day: go out, find #1 bees are clustering themselves from the inner cover, like a bunch of idiots who can’t tell they have food and a place to draw comb and go about their business. Add some deep frames to the deep body that is covering the food bottle.

Next day: mowing the property, and I take a swing by the beeyard, only to find the front of #2 hive covered in bees. Great: #1 has swarmed and landed on #2.

This was not the case, though: turns out, every bee in #2 was hanging on the outside of the box.  Put them all back in, close it up, call it a night.

Today: go back out to make sure they are continuing what they started. Alas, no. The #2 hive is completely empty. I look around the beeyard, and see a dark spot in a tree about 50′ away. There they were, hanging out. I positioned a box with some frames in it where I thought they would land, then pulled the branch toward me and gave it a single hard tug. I’m happy to say I got almost all of them in the first go, including the queen: the workers immediately started fanning like crazy, and some bees that landed outside the box started marching in.

That’s three times to hive this package. It’s supposed to be rainy the next couple of days, so that may keep them home, realizing this is a pretty damn fine place to be: a roof over their head, frames to build on, and food to eat.

Didn’t get any transplants in today, as it started raining while I was getting the girls back into a hive. I’ll have a video of that swarm retrieval up as soon as I can get some time to edit.

I hope those girls are still there tomorrow. It’s a shame to waste that much energy on something if it’s just going to leave or break.

As I type this, it is March 31, 2019. That means it is 26 days until I lose my voice.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

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