File this under "Be Careful What You Wish For." I've been eager to catch a swarm since I started beekeeping two years ago. Last year, I strapped an old hive box to a tree along the edge of the property and baited it with lemongrass oil to lure in a swarm. Nobody bit.
Then this week, Jen said "I think you have bees in your box." And sure enough I found a small swarm had moved into the janky old box I had loaded with crumbling frames.
I collected them in a plastic nuc box and relocated them to the bee yard into a new White hive (White 2) that I bought on Saturday. They're calm, have a nice queen and a sugar water feeder. So, fingers crossed that they do well. They make hive Number 8.
The same day, I walked up on the hill to do my hive inspection and found an enormous mound of bees hanging from the bottom of the Yellow hive. Wow! Two swarms in one day.
I've rehoused one swarm so far and that was cast off from the Blue hive a month after I brought my first hives home in 2023. That time, they moved into a peach tree near the bee yard, so it was easy to catch them. These guys, by contrast, set up in a space where they were tough to access.
I slid a nuc box under them and scraped the mass off the underside of Yellow hive with my hand. They plopped into the open box but left loads of bees under the hive. Usually with a swarm, the queen is in the center of the cluster. Get the queen and the rest of the bees will follow.
I figured I had the queen, but then everybody started moving back up the hive stand to reconvene under the hive again. If there was a queen, she was still under the hive. I tried repeatedly to locate her and get them to settle into the new box but to no avail. Now I suspect they were actually members of the Yellow hive that has gotten so big they needed to move outside for a bit. Something tells me I'll be splitting that hive again to reduce the surplus population.
No comments:
Post a Comment