Swarm Follow-up

I've gotten four swarms this year. The first was up high in a tree in Buckhead. The second was in an I-Beam down south of Atlanta past the airport in Forest Park. The third was in a holly bush in Buckhead. I also got a fourth swarm which just found and moved into an empty hive at Tom's house.

So to follow up:

When I captured the third swarm, I immediately housed it in an eight frame box at the community garden in my neighborhood.

The first swarm was given to me by the caller even though they were his own bees from his own beeyard. I housed them at my house in a nucleus hive for a little while to get them good and started, but I had promised that they would go to the community garden. So about two weeks after I got them, I moved them, still in the nucleus hive to the garden. The greenery on the front is to help the bees know that they need to orient to the new location.

Since they were in a nuc, I kept the moving strap around them. We've had vandals at the community garden who are fond of opening the top of the hive and leaving it like that - terrible for the bees. It's fun to keep bees in a nuc - like a tree. We also keep stones on the tops of those hives - not like we have wind, we don't, but rather to let the vandals know that removing the top is not suggested.

I checked on that hive yesterday as well as the holly bush hive. The nuc hive was boiling over with bees. The holly bush hive also was almost ready for a new box, so since I was there and had the box, I went ahead and added it.

Here's what the nuc hive looked like when I got there:

At this time of year, unless I have reason to worry about a hive, I mostly am opening the box to see if they have used up their storage space and need more room. The nuc hive was bursting at the seams. The minute I put the new box on, the beard disappeared and the bees were happy. 

The difference in the entry is remarkable.

So the last two stories are not happy fairy tales. After all the work to get the I-Beam swarm - two trips to Forest Park, a whole day's worth of time removing them and installing them at the Inn, I went to the inn to check on them and they had vanished. They did not like their quarters and had left. Discouraging. I will need to make a split to give the inn because currently they have no bees.

And the swarm that accepted my invitation and moved into Tom's empty hive appears queenless. When we first inspected that hive after Tom informed us about the swarm, there was a laying queen but the hive had also made queen cells. Sometimes swarms do that - move with the old queen and then fairly quickly get rid of her and make a new queen. Or she may have mated badly. So the next time I inspected there was no pollen coming into the hive and no sure signs of a laying queen. 

Tomorrow I'm taking them a frame of brood and eggs from one of my five backyard hives. I'll do that for a week until I know they have a good queen in the hive, or until they succeed in making one. I'm hoping I get over there tomorrow and find that they, in fact, have an obvious laying queen.

Atlanta is a big city. My hives in my backyard in Virginia Highlands are doing quite well - making lots of honey and thriving. Julia's backyard hives in the northern part of town are not making much honey - at least not as much as last year. It may simply be the difference in location. Also she has lots of construction and forest DEstruction going on behind her house. 

But Tom's hives are also located in her part of town and neither hive needed a new box at my last visit.

Mayhem and Robbery in the Bee Hive

Robbery in the bee hive is disconcerting, to say the least.  It is violent and upsetting to watch.  I am a grandmother on Fridays and after a morning with my grandchildren today at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, came home to find one of my biggest hives being robbed.

Below is a video of the hive.  I usually use a tripod and at the end of the filming with bees head bumping me on all sides, I was not a steady camera holder, so it's jiggly, but I put it up so you can see what robbing actually looks like.

Both Orientation in the afternoons and swarming behavior when the hive is gathering for the swarm are  often confused with robbing.  Both lack the violence.



In the end I soaked a sheet in water and threw it over the hive for a couple of hours.  The robbers desisted and left.

Later in the evening, I removed the sheet and set the robber screen up so that the entry was open for a bit.  The sad bees were carrying out opened larvae.

Under the hive you can see lots of wax shards from the robbers tearing open cells.

I had just inspected this hive yesterday and was pleased to find that they along with the rest of my hives were putting up some nectar and that they had some larvae in the cells.

I don't know what the state of this hive is and if it can recover.  I may open it on Sunday and see what I may need to do to support them, such as add some frames of honey from another hive.

Orienting the New Bees

When bees reach foraging in their development (around 3 weeks old), they have to orient to the hive in order to leave it. This way when they start for home after a nectar-collecting flight, they know where home is. At the end of a day usually around 3:30 or 4:30 in the afternoon, bee hives are all a-buzz as the new foragers fly out for orientation.

They fly out of the entrance, up into the air about a foot, turn and observe the hive. They do this over and over until they "get" the location and the cues they need to find home again.

If you move a beehive, you should move it at least 3 miles as the crow flies from their old location to assure that the bees who leave to forage don't return to the old (now empty) location. The bees we moved last night lived about 2.5 miles as the crow (or the bee) flies from my house. It's possible that they will fly back to their original location, so I wanted to get them to orient to their new home.

Well, I've uploaded a video I made with my camera onto YouTube....it's perfectly in focus on my home computer and not great at all here, but FWIW, here is a video of the bees in orientation flying.



One way to do that is to put distracting unusual things at the hive entrance such as sticks and leaves. You don't block the entrance, but you do throw a few things on the front porch. After a day or two the bees will all be re-oriented and they will move the sticks and debris off the porch as a housecleaning chore.

This was the angriest hive of the three last night when we moved the bees, so before I removed the screen wire from the entrance, I gathered some sticks and grass to use on the entry-way.



Jacketed and gloved (these were angry bees) I gingerly pulled out the screen wire blocking their entrance. I was glad I had already gathered the debris. I quickly set it on the entry as bees poured out into the 45 degree air.


Reassuringly, I almost immediately saw the bees begin to orient, flying out and up and observing their new location. (It was too cold for most bees to fly, but they were doing it anyway.) A few bees head-bumped my veil and a few landed on my shoulders and arms, but for the most part they gathered at the entrance and tried to regroup.


It's interesting that they are gathering on that one side of the entry. Maybe there is less debris on that part of the entry and maybe the queen will be working mainly on that side of the hive. I'll open the hive next weekend to see what's what. I plan to give them new boxes in case there is any disease, wax moth eggs, etc. in the old neglected boxes, and set them up to think of moving to north Georgia (another move, I hate to tell them) in a couple of weeks.

Preview of coming attractions: Next Saturday at 8 AM, I will be picking up a nuc for Blue Heron from Jennifer Berry at her apiary in Good Hope, Georgia.

Orientation is not Swarming

When you are a new beekeeper, it's hard to distinguish between swarming, orientation, and robbing . A swarm leaves the hive with a roar and in a very determined swirl up into the sky - like a tornado of bees. Robbing involves attacking by one set of bees on the occupants of the hive. You can see the attack, dead bees scattered in front of the hive and general mayhem.

Orientation is a different experience. It can be confusing because it contains some of the elements of both swarming and robbing. There's noisy buzzing like a swarm and the hive appears to have many bees leaving all at once. It's chaotic like robbing and the bees appear to be confused about whether they are coming or going - which is how robbing can look.

Here is a video to at least demonstrate orientation for you to clear up some of the confusion. If you can be calm yourself and watch your own bees, you'll begin to see that the same bees are flying up, turning to look at the front of the hive and then returning to the hive to begin the "practice run" again. The other give-away about orientation is that it happens at pretty much the same time every day - somewhere between 3 and 4 PM.

The Bees are Flying

On Sunday in Atlanta finally the temperature began to rise. We've had day after day of highs in the 40s but on Sunday it was supposed to go up to 50. While my thermometer still read 45, the bees began to fly. Both the hives were in a sunnier spot than this thermometer and maybe the bees knew that the afternoon was going to be continually warmer.

There were active bees on the entry way on each hive. In fact, at the time I took these pictures, the bees looked like they were doing orientation flights, but my pictures don't really capture the numbers in the air.
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I have been concerned that the bees in the nuc may not be alive, but they are thriving. Their numbers look strong and they seemed more active than any of my hives.

The Slowly Swirling Small Swarm

Everyone I spoke to about this small swarm told me that I would need to help the hive gradually adjust to the position I wanted the hive to be in on my deck. It couldn't stay where it started out because its location, directly in the flight path of two other hives, would make it practically impossible for me to work or to inspect this little hive.

Cindy Bee and Brendhan (Understudy on Beemaster.com) both told me to move the hive at night after dark and to help the bees adjust in different ways. Cindy said to move the hive a foot every day and turn it about a quarter turn with each move until I had it where I wanted it. Brendhan said that I would need to put grass in the entrance of the hive to make the bees think a tree branch had fallen and that they needed to reorient themselves.

The first day (first picture) the hive moved about a foot and turned toward the sunporch door. Day two the hive is turned even futher and has progressed another foot toward my ultimate goal. On Day Three, it is directly in front of Mellona and facing at a right angle from where it started (90 degrees). Notice the grass in the entry. And on Day Four it is in its final position.

I added a feeder with sugar syrup 1:1 because I left for the mountains this morning and won't be back until Sunday. I couldn't resist lifting the top for a peek this morning before I hit the road. There are four frames of buzzing busy bees in there. Some of the brood I added must have hatched.

I hope, hope, hope they are raising a queen. By the time I get back to Atlanta, my equipment for this hive will have arrived and it can have a real telescoping cover instead of this 2' X 2' sheet.

Frustration of No Camera

My sweet daughter who has the same camera as the one I destroyed last week offered to lend me her camera so I would not be without one while I wait for the one I ordered. Hopefully I may have some pictures tomorrow or the next day.

Meanwhile, we've had two good days of temperature and sky and at the end of the week the bees were working their little hearts out. Both Mellona and Proteus had so much action by the hive that it looked as if orientation flights of new bees were going on all day. In reality, I think they were working hard and fast and zooming in and out of the hives. I have seen bees arriving both with legs laden with pollen as well as hopefully bees filled with nectar.

The weather in Atlanta is not going to help the honey crop this year. From extra cold weather (more to come tomorrow) to really bad rain (right this minute), the work of the bees has been disrupted.

We'll see if I get any honey at all this year.

Beekeeping opens the door to many more things in my environment on which to focus. For example, I now watch the weather every day and think about the effect of whatever is going on with the weather on my bees. I am more interested when I see articles in the paper about how the farmer in this country is affected by the weather.

I also think about how we get so scared of what we don't understand. The papers in this country are filled every day with articles about communities that are so scared of bees that hives are being destroyed by firefighters or pest control people. And these very bees are the pollinators on which so much of our foodstuff depends. Here's an article from India on the same theme.

Getting the Lay of the Bees' Land

At all three hives today around 4 PM in a light rain, the bees at all my hives were getting oriented. At Proteus the bees were flying fast and furiously, but my camera isn't fast enough to catch the action. You can see the shadows of a few of the fast flying bees.

At Mellona the action was even more frantic around 4:30 as the rain began to increase, but the babies still hadn't learned their lessons about where the hive is - so they flew more frantically for a few moments.

Even at Bermuda, orientation was happening, but I decided to take a hopeful picture of this hard-working forager bringing home the bacon to the baby bees - see the pollen in the pollen baskets on her legs?

Wild and crazy bees

Came home to bees swirling all around Destin....hope they are not about to swarm. Maybe new brood is orienting to the hive - I hope so! I also could hear a moaning sound on my deck. The moaning came from a young squirrel sitting under the window of my sunporch - wonder if the girls had stung him?

Since the bees were extremely active, I posted the message below on the Beemaster forum:

I work all day every day and am home to wave good-bye to the bees as they begin their foraging for the day and then in the evening as they are gathering back at the hive.

Today I came home at 4 PM and there is crazy activity at one of my hives. Many bees are swirling in and out of the hive and buzzing loudly.

Perhaps this is new brood orienting to the hive - they seem to be flying up, turning around and looking at the hive and making huge circles.

Am I in for a swarm or is it something that probably happens every day and I'm just not here for it.

BTW, it isn't happening at my other less vigorous (more peaceful) hive.