Swarm at Tom's - Two Cat Size

Yesterday it rained in Atlanta and Tom texted me at about 1:30 PM when the sun was just occasionally breaking through, that the bees at his house were "going crazy."  He sent me this photo that he took of the front hive:

Sure looks like a swarm to me, but it also looks like a swarm that couldn't get the queen to come along so they are out and ready but needing her to join them.

I told him they might not swarm until tomorrow but they would keep trying to get the queen.  Later he reported that he came home to find the bees gone - definitely they had swarmed and left.  He didn't see them anywhere.  Later that day he saw them up in a large pine tree on the edge of his property.

As I drove up to N Georgia, he said the hive was going crazy again.  Bees were everywhere and appeared to be gathering on a tree at about chest height.  I told him I would get Jeff and come to his house at 4:30 as I drove back into Atlanta.

Jeff was already there when I arrived and they were discussing that the bees were no longer in the pine tree and the group consensus was that the bees had moved from the pine tree to the shrub on which they now hung.  It was a HUGE swarm - about the size of two cats and gathered around a branch that hung down.

We spread a sheet under it and put a nuc box (looked really inadequate but that's what I had) on the sheet under the swarm.  We had brought the huge water cooler swarm catcher bottle.  Jeff climbed a ladder and although I was going to hold the bottle, it worked better for him to do it, so he was really the swarm catcher par excellence.  

Jeff shook the branch and the swarm dropped into the nuc box.  We then had to shake the tree a couple more times.  I set the box onto the sheet again (one shake was directly into the box), and the bees began doing the nasonov butts in the air to let the other bees know the queen was in the box.  We put the nuc top on catty-corner, leaving openings for the bees to join Her Majesty and worked the other hive.  There were layers and layers of bees in this box.

Because this hive had swarmed, we wanted to make a split from the back hive.  The second hive was full of queen cells.  We took a couple of frames with good queen cells on them to make the nuc.  The hive was left with at least seven other queen cells that we saw.  It too was preparing to swarm.  

We have not been able to do good swarm control (ie, checkerboarding) because this hive was in a deep and a medium.  As a result you can't move frames in the checkerboard pattern because a deep frame can't move into a medium box.  We had given these bees all kinds of room but you can't argue with the Darwinian imperative to split and survive!  So we did our own split on the second hive.  They may still swarm.  I don't think they have already because we found a frame of eggs, indicating that the queen was probably laying today.  

We made our nuc (in a deep box) up of both deep and medium frames.  At worse they will make drone comb off of the bottom of the medium frames.  But one of the queen cells we took was on a deep.  

I'll cover installation in the next post.  You can see the capped queen cell near the rubber band and another queen cup with larva in it to the upper right.

The Rest of the Splitting Story

After we did our lovely split of Lenox Pointe, it was time to open Colony Square.  The week before on Saturday, I had opened the hive to find eggs - enough that I made a nuc and took it to Morningside Community Garden.  However on this day when we opened the hive, we couldn't find a single egg.  It was mid morning and sunny, so we should have been able to see eggs if they were present.  We also never saw the queen.

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't take any pictures of this phase of things - we were making decisions and struggling with this.  Of course we couldn't split a hive with no eggs - there would not be resources for the queenless hive to make a queen.  And indeed was there a queen in this hive?  We didn't know.

We finally found a frame with about three queen cells on it.  All of them were still open and had the workers upside down in the cell taking care of the larvae.  Would a hive swarm without leaving capped queen cells behind?  Maybe the queen cell that counted and was finished was hiding somewhere???

I think either the hive had swarmed without leaving queen cells finished (unlikely, right?) or they were planning to swarm and were stopping the queen from laying while they made queen cells.  In any event since we only saw the one frame of queen cells, we decided that we would have to move this hive as a whole.  We were taking it to a man who lives behind a community garden in a neighborhood that abuts the Emory campus.  The bees will have not only the community garden, but the floral abundance in lovely Lullwater park on the Emory campus as their foraging ground.

What we decided to do was to put the two boxes of brood together and to put the two boxes of honey together with a bottom board and top as if two separate hives so that we could carry it together.  We left for the day and planned to come back in the evening to move the hives.  We strapped them up before we left and planned to close the entrance with #8 hardware cloth when we returned.

In the dark of night, we carried the queenless half of the Lenox split and the two halves of the Colony Square hive over to Ron's house in the Emory area.

A close up:

By the time we drove 30 minutes to the Emory area (Atlanta is really big, you know), it was dark.
We set the hives up in Ron's backyard - you can see the moving screen we used on one of the hives and the screened wire we used on the other:

Our last move of the night was to take off the screens and leave the bees to settle into their new environs.

So optimistically I was hoping for at least four hives out of these two three year old hives.  Instead I got one even split and moved the other as a whole.  We even brought the deep box on Colony Square because it was full of brood.

I did see one tiny c-shaped larva in that deep, meaning the queen was laying about three days before.  That reassured me a little because one of my worries was that I had inadvertently put the queen in the nuc I had made the week before....not the case, as per the egg age in the old hive.