Fed the bees this morning and took a look into a few, trying to see if I could determine which hive cast the swarm. I believe I found it: the number five hive, which itself was a split from another hive. The queen must have been amazingly productive, as the super and the top brood box were totally empty of all stores. Lack of food will cause them to swarm as they go off looking for greener pastures. I got two stings for my trouble, and for not taking the smoker out with me on this overcast day, but set a feeder on them to get them going again. I’ll have to go back through it, and probably reduce it back down to one brood box to let them build up again. I went through the others on the same hive stand, and they were all fine. Next step: moving to the next hive stand, to break down those hives and see what they have going on. With the smoker. My biggest problem is bees getting caught in the creases in my suit, so when I bend or move my arm to do something, they get crushed and I get a sting in an uncomfortable place (like the crook of my left arm and the inside of the bicep on my right arm). Fun times, kids.
Category Archives: Bees and beekeeping
Catching the swarm, epilogue
Lost the swarm. That’s the way it goes.
Catching the swarm, conclusion
Final score.
Bees – 4
Me – 0
This swarm apparently simply does not want to be caught. Even with a good soaking of sugar water, they won’t clump well and fall into the hive. Instead, the inner core breaks out and they all start flying around, landing back on the trunk of the tree and crawling up to wherever the queen is. If I’d managed to get her in the damn box, they would have happily crawled in, but it seems the pieces of the swarm I did manage to knock down did not have her in it. I left the hive out anyway, as there’s a storm rolling up, and perhaps they’ll be smart enough to take cover in the hive. Or, perhaps they’ll give me a final “fuck you” and fly off somewhere else.
What this means going forward is that I need to disassemble some of the older hives to check for swarm cells, food stores, and so on, as we head into the end of the season. I know this swarm did not come from the five new package hives because the queens in those are clipped (that is, one wing has been cut, so they cannot fly). When those queens need to be superceded, the bees will build a queen cup, and when the new queen hatches, the old one will be dispatched by her. The old hives, however, I’ve allowed to supercede as needed, and I have not requeened each year. Overall, I prefer to keep the genetics going of the bees that have survived in our particular climate. In this case, the old queen will swarm out of the hive with a bunch of workers, leaving the rest of the bees to take care of the new queen. The question is: which of those hives did this swarm come from? The answer involves backbreaking work to look into the older hives, to check for swarm cells in hives that might be thinking about swarming – in which case, they need to be split, with some bees, food, and brood (with at least one egg that is one to three days old, as the bees need that to create a new queen) moved to another hive body. I might be able to tell from which hive this swarm originated during the inspection process and determine why they swarmed.
So, my shitty week remains the same. Swell.
Catching the swarm, part four
Current score.
Bees – 3
Me – 0
Managed to get up a tad bit higher this morning after returning from the vet, and found the swarm had clumped up a bit better – but again, alas, even nearer the trunk of the tree. I got a good spray on them, and did actually managed to dislodge some of them in a clump, but the distance to fall was too great, and not many actually landed. I watched them for awhile, and saw some checking out th hive body, then flying back up. I figured I’d give them a bit to see if the scouts would get them moving to the hive, and went inside to (finally) have some breakfast. The branch they were on is visible from the window near my desk, and while waiting for the coffee to finish, I glanced out: the swarm was gone. So I ran back outside, to see if I could see them in the air, and what do you know? They had gotten pissed off enough at the other location to reposition. Now they are on a small tree, near the shed, about five feet off the ground. I had thought round three would be the last fail and be a perfect example of the shitty week I’ve had thus far, but there seems to be life in this chase yet. After I chug some of this shake and coffee as quickly as possible, I’m going to run back out and reposition the gear to see if I can capture them before they take off for good.
Catching the swarm, part three
Second round.
Bees – 2
Me – 0
Went out and gave it another go. They are simply too high off the ground and getting to them is next to impossible. I’m hoping the ones I did manage to escort into the hive body will go back to their colleagues and tell them what a sweet little new home they found. It is now lightning and thundering very close to the ranch, so that ends our “capture the swarm” game for today.
Catching the swarm, part two
Current score.
Bees – 1
Me – 0
The two baby swarms joined up into one ball…at the trunk side of the branch, the harder of the two spaces to reach. Naturally. Ungrateful bitches. I wasn’t able to get close enough to them with the first setup and attempt to spray them with sugar water to keep them still and then be able to drop them in a clump. I did spray them as well as was possible and tried to scrape them off, but I’m just about six inches too short with the setup I had, and there was no satisfying plop of bees into the hive below them. If they’re still hanging out there later, towards dusk, I’m going to have another go at them, hauling out the giant ladder I used when I was painting the barn and try to position it somehow in that small stand of saw palmettos. By the way, there’s a reason they have that name. Don’t start tromping around in them trying to get a working space and positioning a hive body in your shorts. It’s a bad idea.
Catching the swarm
Two baby swarms about 40′ up in one of the giant pines. To give you a sense of it, the second picture is the tree. The swarms are on the third branch on the left, counting up from the bottom. The third pic is the area under the tree that I get to work in. Yay. This should be interesting.
Swarming during the nectar flow
This isn’t something I’ve seen thus far in my beekeeping experience: a swarm smack dab in the midst of the nectar flow. I had done a quick check and thought I had made a mistake by not trusting my instincts: the strongest hive looked a bit to me like it needed to be split, and I suspected this swarm came from that hive.
See them up there on the second branch on the left of the tree? How about a closer look?
They were fairly high off the ground, and far enough away from the trunk that getting them was going to be a bit of a puzzle. I figured with our tallest ladder – the one I used when I painted the barn – I could probably get close enough to spray them with some sugar water to get them to clump, and then use an extensible stick of some kind (like the one we use to change lightbulbs) to knock them down. It sounded like a good plan. Unfortunately, when I headed back out later in the afternoon closer to dusk to check where to set up, they’d flown away to whatever home the scouts had found. Bummer.
On the positive side, when I suited up to head to the yard to see which hive had tossed the swarm, it seems it did not come from the hive I thought, but from another that had already tossed two swarms very early this season just days apart. That hive must be possessed.
On another positive note, during my quick inspection post-swarm loss, I found one of the hives that I had already added a honey super on needed another, and one of the hives that had built up into two brood boxes was now ready for a honey super themselves. The very strong hive had a second honey super added last week, and a peek at a few of the frames in the original super showed they are capping off honey at a fantastic pace. Minus the swarms that couldn’t be caught, this season is turning out to be a good one thus far.
The “b” stands for “bitch”
Let me tell you something about bees. They can be real bitches sometimes. This is a swarm today from a hive I just checked four days ago. No swarm cells, plenty of room to roam. And here they are, swarming out this afternoon. Then, just after that swarm had landed, another swarm quite literally started from the hive right next to that one. That one likewise had an inspection four days ago. These two hives were the one I thought had gone queenless but had not; they turned out to be strong, vigorous hives. Perhaps too strong and my lesson learned: obviously we are doing something right here because we have strong bees. Obviously I am doing something wrong, and next season, instead of looking for signs of impending swarms, I will just go ahead and make splits without waiting, knowing now that they are incredibly hardy.
Having said that, they are also sometimes incredibly annoying. The second swarm went not just to the same tree, which would have been very convenient, but to the very same branch, which is not. The combined weight of the two swarms bowed the branch to the ground as you see in the second picture.
I set up two boxes and tried to separate the clumps to attempt to get a queen in each box, but missed. The bees from the second box went into the first after I dumped them into that second box, resulting in a gigantic batch of bees in the first box. So, I improvised a little. I took several frames from the full box and shook them into the second, hoping like hell that one queen was now in the second box. Then I put a queen excluder on the first box and put the second box on top, with the top cover propped open. This way, the queens cannot pass through between the boxes, but the workers can. What I am hoping is the fanning the bees do at the entrance of the stack (at the bottom) and the fanning at the cover (at the top) will call all the workers into their proper spaces. If this works, I can then just remove the top box off to its own place, and presto: both swarms captured. We will see how that works.
Here’s a closer look at the two swarms sharing the same branch.
That is a fair number of bees, yes. I’m hopeful they’ll stay.
Hive inspections
Today was hive inspection day at the ranch. Inspections are necessary to gauge the health of the hives, making sure they have not gone queenless (and if they have, are they making a new one?), checking for mites or small hive beetles, ensuring they are bringing in adequate pollen and nectar, that there are larva and capped brood, and seeing if they have enough room to expand – a crowded hive is one that will swarm.
This hive is quite healthy, and one I was concerned about possibly swarming. In the top brood box, there were plenty of larva/capped brood, the foragers are bringing in pollen and nectar, and all is well. I wanted to check the lower box, so pulled the top one off. In the lower box, there were some empty brood frames, and some capped brood, along with stores. Since bees tend to move upward, I decided to swap the top and bottom boxes, putting the main action on the bottom, and leaving the top box for expansion. I didn’t find any real indicators of a potential swarm, but now that we’re moving into the real season, I’ll be keeping an eye on them, as with the others.
This is a frame from the super (the honey storage area) on this same hive. They have drawn out the comb and this will be future honey, once the cells are filled, the liquid is dried to a certain percentage of moisture, and then they cap it.
The foundation on this frame is thinset. I hate it, and so do the bees. Fortunately, we don’t have a ton of it in use. As I find it, if possible I’ve been swapping it out for a new frame with a foundation called Rite Cell, which is plastic with a beeswax coating. I’ve found the bees will often not fully draw comb on the thinset as seen here, and that it is not sturdy enough to handle the weight of a frame full of honey, brood, and pollen. This one I could not replace immediately due to the brood on it, but I moved it into the top box of this hive, so when the brood hatches and they start using it for stores, I can swap it out (leaving the frame leaned up against the hive so they can retrieve their stores and move them back into the hive).
Once the larvae reach a certain age, the bees will cap them off. When they mature, the new bees will chew through the capping to let themselves out. On this frame, we can see some larvae in the process of being capped.
The pollen the girls are bringing in is a delightful mix of colors, testament to all the various things blooming in our area.
Some of the pollen is neon orange – could it be from the neon cheese plants Kraft grows for their mac & cheese?
We also found a new bee breaking out of its cell.
This is what we like to see: good brood (some already out, obviously), with an arc of pollen that isn’t really visible here, and the outside arc is capped honey.
These are queen cells – one capped off, two others in progress. Queen cells can be a sign that the hive went queenless, but not before there were eggs suitable to be replacement queens, or that there is a possibility of the hive preparing for a swarm. Generally in the case of the latter, we will also find drone comb attached to the bottoms of the frames in the upper box, and affixed to the tops of the frames in the lower. This frame, shown upside down here, had no drone comb at the bottom, only one section of drone comb on the bottom of the adjacent frame, and they seem to have plenty of room for brood and stores, so I don’t think this is an imminent swarming. It may just be a safeguard, or they may want to replace the existing queen for some reason, like poor laying. I didn’t really see any bad brood patterns in any of the boxes, but who can read the mind of the bees and what they think they want to do? What this means overall is that I’ll need to keep an eye on them and check back on them in about a week.
The bees in this hive drew out some truly funky comb in the shape of an arc, and another piece perpendicular to the foundation. It does not appear the queen cared all that much, as she laid eggs in both and the bees capped them right off. Bees can be so weird sometimes.
This frame had a bit of comb drawn and nectar in some cells, but was otherwise unremarkable and almost empty. I did not originally see the queen on the frame, and didn’t expect her to be there. Looking over the photos, though, she and her entourage were on the frame.
Did you find her? Here she is (black arrow) with her attendants (red arrow). They have their butts in the air and are flapping their wings to help spread the queen’s pheromone.
We looked through all the hives, and found no mites and no small hive beetles. The captured swarm hive is expanding itself nicely, and has drawn out six of the right frames in the box. The two hives I initially thought had gone queenless are both working to draw out comb in the additional brood boxes I put on them toward the end of last month. Things are looking good in the bee yard!