Well, I really am a bee haver right now. I have bees. I just don't have enough time to do it all. Last year I spent 300.00 on bees for 3 new hives so I had honey and pollination for the garden. All three died by March of this year. I should have just set the 300.00 on fire and I would still have the same nothing. Tonight as I was walking across the yard to get a bucket and fertilizer for the corn I heard the hum... there is a very distinctive sound to a swarm of bees. Anyone who has heard it knows what it is. There is nothing else like it that I can relate it to. Then I stood there and watched waiting for them to cluster... waaaay out of reach as usual. As I stood there thinking I couldn't be so lucky as to just have them hive themselves right in one of the hives sitting from the last dead colonies... well, lo and behold...looky what happened. hive number 2 also got some bees a lot of bees. Hopefully there are two swarms from the only hive I had. We will see tomorrow if they are still in both hives or if bunches of them ended up in the wrong one, but I don't know. I haven't even cleaned out both hives yet. I pulled the cover off of one and took off the extra super, but the other is just sitting. the landing board...
Lol Carolyn,..soft landing,..what luck to have a swarm arrive,..i guess some of the bees from the hive that died,.. had left and started up elsewhere,..returned again,..is that possible?,..i hope they remain in good health and you have lots of honey.
You are a lucky so-n-so ain'cha. You were naughty not to have cleaned those hives yet. chuckle. Are you going to at least give them some new foundation? Now is also a great time to treat them with a light spraying oxalic acid, sugar and water because all the varroa mites will have no capped cells to hide in. I am really happy for you and I hope that you have two swarms with queens. You know, these swarms are essentially all foragers and have no "house bees" with them. I wonder if you could get a frame of closed brood from a fellow beekeeper to put in those hives so that the queen can immediately begin laying and the house bees will soon emerge to tend the larvae. Another technique that we use here with swarms is to give them a bit of sugar water after three days of being in your hives. That is because the bees that cane were all full of honey, but only enough for three days, they may need a bit of help. At any rate, I am excited for you and hope that you will have more pics of your bees to show.
Philip, I had one hive established that has been here for several years, and I assume these came from that hive. I didn't actually see them emerge, but it is hard to beelieve they came from elsewhere. I do have a bee tree in the woods. I will have to check that tomorrow and see if there is any activity in it. S, I think I am blessed more than lucky. Bad of me to not have had anything done to those empty hives, but I am glad I didn't pick them up and put them away in the shed. that would have been a waste. No capped brood from anyone I am guessing. Not at this time. If mine are swarming I am thinking most everybody else's are too. I have a few emptied supers still in the garage from extracting last Fall. I will pop those on there to feed them since I know there is still honey in them to be used.
I can hardly wait to see how this turns out. Do you yet know if there are two queens present in the two hives, or just one?
S, I don't know if there were two queens or not. there was no cluster formed while I was watching this happen. Today I will watch to see what happens. Maybe there was only one and the bees will move back to the hive they came from or over to the hive with all the other swarm bees.
Hiya C---I am now totally confused. Were the bees that swarmed your own...or did they come from another place? I thought that I read that you had lost all of your bees during the winter. I was thinking that if the swarm came from your own hive, then they came with the old queen and a new, young queen ought to be in the old hive. If the swarms came from somewhere else, then it is possible that one of them could be an "after swarm". Ach, but maybe it was just one swarm that couldn't make up its mind which hive to take. I shall be watching this thread with great interest. When do you expect that you will take a look into the hives?
No, I still had one hive... the one I have had for several years. All the ones I purchased last year died. Since it is pouring outside right now I don't think it will be this morning at all. maybe tomorrow or next week one day. Friday and Sat are all scheduled up already. I have a market on Saturday.
One swarm- one box has bees in it. the other box is just "lurkers" or maybe they will swarm again from the original hive into this empty box.
Well, it remains interesting. Have you looked inside that one remaining hive where the swarm came out of? Is there one or perhaps more queens in there still? I am really curious how you will handle this development.
That is so cool. I really want to pick up bee keeping but barely have time for my piddly garden. Right now. Maybe in a year or two when I'm not trying to pay everything off I'll pick it up. I will of course rely heavily on y'all here to guide me through the process. The thought of honey on demand for mead has me all giddy.
So Carolyn--How did it all turn out? Did you get one or two swarms? ...and are they oké and functioning colonies? You had said that one hive had lurkers in it...did that turn out to be the case, or was there a queen in amongst the lurkers?
Yeah S, I have been a bee haver... I am trying, but I just can't keep up with it all, and bees need the middle of the day attention which I am struggling to find in nice weather... we haven't had nice weather until today. now hopefully this week I can get a helper here to watch the stand and I can get into the hives. It looks like there was only one hive, maybe a swarm will find this empty one, too. I did get some lures to put in there... maybe today since the sun is shining... finally.
first thing this morning I weed eated around the hives. Then I called my friend Michael to see if he wanted to work on bees today... he is just learning and is interested in having bees. This is what it looks like all day long... bees everywhere. There is a super and inner cover left on after last years honey extraction. the top box had just three frames in it.. oops. oops, here are the three frames. FILLED with bees and honey. off came the first super and then the inner cover to reveal the super I left on there last year with the hopes they would get through the winter with the extra honey in there. It worked! There is brood between the super and the deep. it was loaded with brood. I think the swarm came from somewhere else. not this box because I wouldn't be seeing all this larvae if that was the case. I moved on to the swarm boxes and found that the one box was loaded with calm bees. of which I got no photos of. Sorry. Then I moved on to the last box of which I was pretty sure was empty. I opened it cautiously just in case and lo and behold there were BEES. Not as calm as the previous box either... so I wasn't sure... was it the swarm from last week and I had a "worker-queen" which only lays drone eggs. eventually the hive dies off since it wasn't a real queen. I couldn't find any brood in it. no eggs (not that my eyes are as young as they used to be, I should have had my readers with me) that I could see. nothing, but there was a lot of honey in the top box and I found a cluster that was like velcro... but no eggs, which means not new brood. So I went back to the swarm from last week that I watched go into that box and went through it to see if I could find brood in it and compare it. There was capped brood in it and un capped brood and a big fat queen... so, with a bit of a worry, I went back to the last box to have another look-see of the brood area...then I saw the QUEEN! hip hip hooray! I think it was a different swarm from maybe the last couple days. I'll have to look again in a few days for brood. As I was cleaning up and putting my stuff away in came the neighbor a few roads away to offer me a swarm clustered in her tree....
