What Happened to the Absconded Hive

The picture below is a picture of the bees in this box on Saturday. There were plenty of bees in the box and I replaced the baggie feeder.



Last night (as described in the last post) I found the absconded bees attached in a cluster to the hurricane fence between my house and my neighbors. This morning I was determined to move these bees into a box. I wanted to do this to be a good neighbor and to try to save these bees.

I put on my beesuit and went out with an empty wax milk carton to try to gather the bees from the fence and pour them into the hive. At this point, I didn't have access to my neighbor's yard, so it was quite difficult to gather the bees. After a while I gave up and smeared swarm lure on the porch of the hive box about two feet from the swarm.

The hive box was a new box, new SBB, new slatted rack. The frames were the drawn frames from this original hive's box, as well as the inner cover and telescoping cover from the hive box. I took two frames of honey from another hive and there were two frames of honey left from the original hive. So the box included four frames of honey as well as a ziploc bag of 2:1 honey.

I gave up and went inside to finish getting ready for work. When I went to my car, I could see the swarm swirling in the air. I jumped out of the car and turned on the camera. In my excitement, I forgot that you can't turn the camera on its side to make movies, so the movie I attempted is on its side, but I thought you might like to see it anyway.

Hopefully the bees will stay in this box. I'll move it nearer to the other yard hives and combine it with Hyron which is still weakly on the deck.