Swarm - 03/12/2012

So it was about 2:00pm, the temperature was right and the bees were in flight when the call came. "There is a swirl of bees!!!"  After a brief discussion and being happy I had just purchased the necessary equipment to make yet one more hive, I headed to the action. 

When I arrived, I could see the bees were in a very neat cluster.

 

We proceeded to ready our new deep brood box to receive the swarm.  To ready our brood box we did the following:

1. Positioned the box near the swarm.  The box had a screen bottom and was up on cinder blocks so when the process was completed it could easily be picked up.
2. All of the 10 frames were sprayed with sugar water.
3. A hint of Lemon Grass was rubbed over frame # 5.
4. A screen inner cover was within arms reach.

With everything ready we just had to get the swarm into the box.  Fortunately the beekeeper with me had a wonderful ladder that was just the right height.

So I climbed up the ladder and simultaneously clipped the branch with one hand and held it with another.  The trick is to gently lower the branch until you are ready to get the bees into the box and then you shake them in with one or two shakes.  The bee boss showed me this a few years back.  It is interesting to watch.  The one bee we want in the box is the queen.  She naturally goes down into the box looking for a dark spot.  Note there is a bottom screen under the box so no bees fall through.

The next part of the process is timing.  When we looked at the swarm on the tree branch they were debating.  We learned this from Dr. Thomas D. Seeley in his book "HoneyBee Democracy".  The bees were deciding where to go.  If we snag them before they take a vote, we can move them where we want.  Well, that's the theory but, of course, the bees didn't read Dr. Seeley's book.

With the bees in the box we wanted to give as many as possible a chance to join their friends.  So a pause of a minute seemed prudent.  Too long of a pause and they will orient themselves to this new location and the beekeepers rule of 2 feet  or 2 miles comes into play.  Also I put a screen top on the box to keep bees in and encourage them to cluster in the box.  Seems to work.

So if we have our timing right and a nicely prepared home for them, hopefully our new little bees want to stay. If we treat them nice we can get the bees to send out their little pheromones in front of the hive to tell their buddies, this is where we go.  A cinder block and ladder had some lost bees so we brought that over to the hive. They left their cinder block, the ladder and finally the screen to go inside.

We poured a thin sugar water solution into the Mann Lake hivetop feeder to stimulate wax and cell building.

Finally our new hive "Chet" is in for the night.

Here's hoping we got it right.

A special thanks to Dietlinde Zipkin, the beekeeper behind the lens, for all of her great photography.  In addition to taking all of the pictures, she was busy working with me in many ways to pull this off.

Bee Boy out.

Honeybee wrestling or our first swarm

I have worked with the Bee Boss over the past two years and have watched him wrestle bees.  I guess for real beekeepers the term would be going on a "swarm call".  So yesterday was a nice 75 +  degree Fahrenheit day and I wanted to check out our Charlotte bee yard which is located in the backyard of some new friends and new beekeepers.  I put the call out to our friend and she said "sounded good".  A short time later I received a happily frantic call with the news that there was a swarm in one of the nearby trees.  The bee wrestling/wrangling had begun.

It took me about an hour to load up the bee mobile. A second call from her indicated there might be 2 swarms so I had to come up with additional gear for a possible second swarm.  The good news was that everything was close to the ground.

When I arrived to assess the situation, one of the swarms had vanished.  Upon closer inspection it appeared that perhaps the bees had been overzealous and gone out on a limb so to speak on one of the swarm locations. My wife and I discussed theories as to why bees would swarm on a warm stone on the ground rather than in a high tree branch.  Perhaps, once again, those darn bees had not read their bee manual and were not swarming the  "right way".

So with assistance from my new bee assistant,  we shook the stones and bees over a new hive body.  I had prepped the hive body by spraying the frames with sugar water.  There appeared to be a flurry of bees but they started clustering in the hive. I put a screen top over the hive but to the bees, screen schmeem.  I gently attempted brushing them into the box to no avail.  My next plan of attack was to spray them with sugar water and gently use a dust pan and escort them one by one into the new hive.  My thinking here was that if we got enough bees inside the hive, their little pheromones would kick in with the come home scent and the rest of the swarm would join them.

When I left, there were a few bees flying in and out but not enough to convince me we had a queen, the bees were happy and they would stay.  Give it a day or so and we'll see.

Bee boy out.