Interference with Honey Bee Democracy and the Death of a Queen

 When a swarm issues from a beehive, the bees gather around the swarming queen on a bush or tree and cluster together. They aren't just resting and they aren't settling in for the long haul. Instead the swarm is sending out scouts every minute to find a new home for the hive. As the scouts return to the swarm, they dance on the surface of the swarm and campaign for the place they think would be a good home.

Tom Seeley explains in Honeybee Democracy that the dancing scouts are trying to convince other bees to go scout out the place they have found. If the convinced bees visit the new home and like it, they return and campaign to get others to go. If the bee doesn't find the place appealing, she returns and doesn't name call or belittle the choice. She doesn't bully the bees who want to move to the new place. She just doesn't campaign for it or try to get any of her sisters to go and visit.

In the end, some new home place will have convinced enough bees in the swarm that it is a good place to resettle. The swarm rises from the tree or bush and flies to the new place and moves in.

But if a beekeeper comes along and captures the swarm, we interfere with honey bee democracy. We have autocratically decided that our hive box is where this hive should live. 

Sometimes the bees don't agree.

I have an apiary site in the community garden at Morningside in Atlanta. Like many community gardens, this one is on Georgia Power land and huge power lines run over the hillside apiary site. Georgia Power "maintains" the land because it belongs to them. I put maintains in quotation marks because they do not go near the beehives and the grass grows very tall there. 

I don't think the bees like the power lines. I have housed three swarms on that hillside over the years and not a one of them stayed. 

Most recently I caught another swarm on April 4. I think it was from my own hive. I have a very large hive that has now swarmed three times. It had some beautiful queen cells in it - huge. One had opened and the others seemed to be left untouched. The first swarm I took to Morningside and they didn't stay.

I think the second queen was in a small swarm about fifty yards from my house. My neighbor who didn't know I would come to get it, promised it to someone else, but I feel pretty sure they were from my beehives. By the time the person she called returned to Atlanta, the bees had left for parts unknown.

As I was driving home from out of town on April 4, my neighbor called me to report that he had seen a huge swarm swirling around in his backyard (just over the fence from my hives) and that it had landed in a shrub across the street. I was about an hour from Atlanta and told him I would rescue them as soon as I returned if they were still there. They were and here is the capture in my new box from Hive Butler:

I decided to house these in a hive in my backyard, about fifty yards from their original hive and this time I put a queen "includer" under the hive between it and the opening to keep the queen in the hive for a day and discourage them from leaving. It then poured rain the entire next day and I couldn't remove the queen includer until Wednesday (almost 48 hours later). I was worried that the bees would still leave, but they did not.

Instead I discovered an odd phenomenon yesterday (April 11). In front of the hive was this ball of bees. I sat down with my veil on and took a tiny stick and tried literally to get to the bottom of it. But the bees were determined to keep this ball going and stung me and wouldn't let me interfere. I noticed that the bees in the hive were continuing to fly in and out with high numbers and regularity. They did not feel pulled to gather with the ball of bees on the ground. Here's what the bee ball looked like:

From the cinder block corner in the upper right, you can see how close they are to the hive. As I disrupted them a bit with the stick, I thought I saw a queen bee but can't be sure. My theory is that like many secondary swarms, this one left its hive with more than one queen. Possibly both queens left to mate and this one was the second one to return. The bees now have a mated queen in the hive and the bees don't want two, so they are balling her to death.

Note: Sometimes hives do have two queens but typically when that happens, it's a mother and a daughter. These two would be sisters. (Need to do more research about this.)

This morning I went out, hoping to find in the grass whatever dead thing they were on top of, and this is what I saw:

The ball is still there - not as active. I expect that some of these bees are dead. Maybe later today I can get to the bottom of it, but I still think what is under the ball is a second queen. I'll know more when I inspect the captured swarm hive in about a week to see if they have a functioning queen.

Bees often ball to death intruders in the hive - like hornets - but I haven't seen hornets yet this year and I'm betting on this being a queen.

Meanwhile, aren't bees the most interesting creatures in the whole world?

At 2 PM the next day (today), the cluster/ball was much smaller. I took a stick and stirred up the bottom and indeed, it was a queen bee. If you have any doubt as you look at the photo (she is curved into a C shape), you can see that her wings end and her abdomen extends about 1/3 longer than her wings. 

We'll know for sure next week when I inspect to see a laying queen, but I'll bet I do and this is the second queen in the swarm who managed to leave to go get mated but was balled to death to keep her from becoming the queen of this colony. 

From this angle you can see how much longer her abdomen is than her wings.

I brought her inside and she is lying in state on my computer desk. Rest In Peace - she certainly didn't plan for this ending.

Video Record of the First Day of Spring Swarm Capture and Installation

 Yesterday, as I reported in my last post, while I was building a chicken coop in my backyard, my own hive swarmed. I had been checker boarding for several weeks and they swarmed anyway. But luckily I captured the swarm.

Unluckily, the movie I made on my iPhone required "converting?" That's the first time that has happened to me and it wouldn't download even after converting (from what??). So I shot some screenshots of the movie and then filmed the install which did not require converting for some reason.

Let me know in the comments or by email if you have any questions.

It's Earth Day for Bees and People

My friend Curt Barrett and I were featured in an article that appeared online on Mother Nature Network.  Here it is.  Tom Oder interviewed each of us and then communicated what he learned about bee swarms.

The article mentions our swarm adventures which have been featured on this blog.  (Curt and I did the Bee-wo-Jima capture)

Impossible Swarm Day Two

I left the swarm all night with my swarm box with a ventilated hive cover on the top.  The cover was open 1/2 inch so that if the bees wanted to come into the box, they could.

I arrived at 7:30 before sunrise, although it was getting light, this morning.  A car was parked in the driveway - which had not been true the night before.  The bees I had scooped were clustered together in the box under the ventilated cover.

The majority of the swarm was still in the shrub.  This was not the scenario I had imagined, but as the sun came up, the scenario I HAD imagined began to come true.  As the sun came up, the bees in the box got all active.  The bees left the collection box and moved back to her Majesty in the shrub.  They used a branch as a bridge and all of them went across it as I watched.

Now I hadn't a clue as to what to do.  I drove home (less than 5 minutes), picked up a cardboard nuc box, loaded it with five medium frames of drawn comb, smeared the entry to the box with lemon grass oil.  I took it back to the swarm location.  I set the nuc box down with the entry near the shrub and left for my 9 AM appointment at my office with little hope for collecting this swarm.  Before I left I wrote a note and put it on windshield of the car in the driveway:

Dear Homeowner:

There is a swarm of bees in the shrub at the street end of your driveway.  

I am attempting to collect the bees.  All of my equipment and hopefully 

the bees will be gone at the end of the day.  Let me know if you have 

any questions.

Linda Tillman

Master Beekeeper

404-447-1943

At noon I had a break so I drove back over to the swarm (10 minutes from my office).  There I found an empty collection box and bees all snuggling up to each other in the shrub.  No action at all in the nuc box.

Disgusted with all the time I had spent on this, I threw the collection box into the car and changed the position of the nuc box.

Again I returned to the office.  Around 5 PM I got an email from Anne, who had helped me with her flashlight last night.  She had walked by the swarm and saw the nuc box.  She said there were no bees on the shrub and bees flying in and out of the box!

My grandkids went home at 5:30 so I rode over to see for myself.  There were bees flying in and out of the box.  I decided to wait until dark to remove it. 

At 8:35, I drove back over and closed up the nuc box.

From the second photo, you can see that a ton of bees were not flying in and out.  Maybe there are only a handful in there and the rest flew off to a new home.

Anyway, I brought them home and set the box (which felt really light although I could hear an interior buzz) on an empty hive box until tomorrow when I will install it.  If there is a full hive of bees in it,  I'll let you know. 

I should have just set up the nuc box last night - could have saved myself a lot of stings!

Impossible Swarm

Tonight I got a swarm call.  Swarm season has begun.

I was thrilled because my hive at the Morningside Community Garden has died and I want to have a hive at that community garden.  The beehive makes for a good ambassador for beekeeping and it's educational for the people who come by the garden.

So I got the call at 8 PM and headed off to Oakdale Road, a street very close to me.  It was almost dark and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find the bees although the caller said they were on a shrub about a foot from the ground near the sidewalk.

I arrived and quickly found the bees, but OH, what a DIFFICULT swarm to capture.  It was in a shrub with tiny branches from the main trunk.  The branches came out of the trunk all the way down to the ground.  There was nothing to cut or shake and the bees were on about twelve branches all together.  The swarm was the size of a fat football.

I put a white sheet right up against the swarm which, although the top of it was about a foot from the ground, was actually sitting right on the ground.

This out of focus photo was taken with my cell phone.  I cut all of those branches sticking out from the swarm so I could get close to it.  

A very sweet relatively new beekeeper named Anne had seen the bees while running and made the swarm call, so she came to see me "get" the swarm.  I am so very, very grateful.  If it weren't for her and her deft use of the flashlight, I might still be over there trying to scoop up bees. 

I used my milk carton scoop to try to scoop the bees but only a few tablespoons of them were in the milk carton at a time to dump into the box.  This was because the bees were not just on one branch of the shrub to be easily scooped off.  Instead every scoop ran into the multitude of branches.  It was just about hopeless.

I put my box at an angle right up against it and shook what I could into it.

I put a ventilated top on the box and left about a 1/2 inch opening.  Some bees were doing the nasonov dance on the edge of the box, but I don't think I got the queen.  

I got stung (an unusual thing to happen while trying to collect a swarm) at least 15 times - maybe 20.  I counted eight on my hands and arms, four on my stomach, and I haven't looked at my legs yet but there are at least five there.  

In the end I left the box with the opening there right next to the swarm.  I'll go in the morning before work.  At best, I will find all the bees happily in the box.  At worst, I'll find the box, sheet and bees all gone.  At medium, I'll find all the bees out of the box and back surrounding their queen.  

Driving home I got stung two more times!  My car was full of random bees when I locked it up at my house and went inside and had a beer.

If tomorrow they are back on the shrub, good luck to them.  I hope they find a happy home, but it won't be at the Morningside community garden!!!!!

PS.  Post a bath and a beer the only stings still evident are one on my right hand and three on my left hand (the one that was doing the scooping).  As this is my 10th year of beekeeping, it makes sense that my immunity to stings has grown.  The four that I can still see  happened early in the process when I couldn't scrape the stinger out.  One on my left hand drew blood, which means the stinger hit a small blood vessel, probably, and that would cause more of a reaction.

Where I Bee

I don't think I've posted this year about my hives and where they are.

I have one hive at Chastain Conservancy.  It's a teaching site for my bee club and Julia, Noah and I all have hives there.  I have one hive that was made from the swarm that a beekeeper donated to the teaching cause.  It came to us on April Fool's Day and has done well.

I checked on it today, planning to take a frame of brood and eggs from it to another hive.  BUT they had requeened themselves.  I found the opened queen cell and many others that had been opened.  The bees were quiet and contained.  They had many cells cleaned and polished waiting for the new queen to start laying.

This must have been a well-regulated plan in that they had two frames of capped brood, about ready to emerge (dark biscuit) and probably their new queen is in the process of her mating days right now.  This means that when the capped brood was laid, they made a queen cell from one of those eggs.  The queen emerges in 16, compared to 21 for the worker, so she has emerged (before the remaining brood laid on the same day) and should soon start laying.

So I didn't take a frame from them!                                  

I also have two hives at my friend, Tom's house.  These were the Bill Owens hives that I got at auction in September, 2013.  These two hives were doing great as spring began.  Since they are in deep boxes and don't have medium supers, I was unable to spread out the brood nest when we added the first new boxes to these hives.  Both hives swarmed.  

I captured both swarms which are now in my backyard.  The hives at Tom's are probably not going to produce much honey this year although both hives have two full boxes of honey on them.  They are struggling with post-swarm.  They swarmed on March 30 and April 9, respectively.  

The front hive (March 30) apparently failed to get a good queen and is now queenless.  We have put in one frame of brood and eggs but on inspection on Monday, did not see any evidence of a queen cell.  The hive was quiet and has not developed a laying worker.  I will take another frame of brood and eggs over there to it tomorrow.  I wanted to today from the Chastian hive but they were not in any kind of shape to do that.

The back hive (swarmed April 9) has a queen who is up and running and has been laying but they are slow to rebuild.  These hives have had the same number of boxes on them for the last three weeks when many other hives are adding a box a week.

I have two hives at the Stonehurst Place Inn.  One of them overwintered and is doing well, making honey, expanding, etc.  I will check on them tomorrow as well.  I last checked them a week ago.  The second hive at Stonehurst is a nuc that I got rather late (4/27) from Ray Civitts.  They have now been installed three and a half weeks.  I don't expect honey with this late a start.

(For anyone keeping tabs, we are up to five)

I have two hives in Rabun County at my friends' farm.  Those hives were installed on April 26 and May 3 - again unlikely to get much honey with this late start, but the flora in the mountains is about three weeks behind Atlanta, so if the bears leave us alone, maybe we'll get something from these hives.

I was in the area this past weekend and stopped to add needed boxes to each hive.  The moving straps are to make us think we are keeping the bears at bay!  I think a determined bear might argue with both us and the bees.

In his backyard, Jeff has two hives that we got from Buster's Bees when I ordered them in December, thinking my hives would not make it through the winter.  We installed them on April 11.  He is mostly managing those but he and I keep bees together.  They now have new boxes on them - maybe two - I'm not certain.

The other two hives from Buster are at the Morningside community garden and are rocking along.  I gave each of them a new box yesterday.  They were installed on April 26 and now each is composed of three boxes.

So I have 11 hives in other places.

In my own backyard, I have one hive that overwintered, the hive from Sebastian's yard that we moved at the end of March, the two swarm hives from Tom's house, a swarm I caught in my neighborhood just down the street from my house, a split in a three box nuc that I made from one of Tom's hives as a swarm prevention measure (didn't work, obviously), and a small hive of failure-to-thrive bees that I got from a beekeeper who thought they had swarmed.  

It was a tiny swarm and is not doing well.  I got them on April 1 and they are still on just three frames in a nuc.  I don't want to combine them with another hive because they are from a beekeeper who treats his bees and I don't know what their problem is but they don't seem to be doing anything.  I think they were actually absconding to get away from the treatment.  I'm just going to leave them alone and they may die, but I'm not going to take any action.

So not counting the two nucs (Failure to Thrive and the Tom Split), I have five decent hives in my backyard.  If I eventually move the Tom Split into a full box, I'll count it but not for now.  So sixteen altogether.  Some will have honey for me this year.  Others will just build up hopefully to go through the winter.