Dilemma of the Possibly Queenless Swarm

When you get a small swarm, it sometimes is an after swarm. When a hive swarms, about half the hive leaves and the queen goes with the swarm. They leave behind enough bees to keep the hive going and either a virgin queen or a queen about to emerge. Sometimes in a large hive, there are several after swarms, each containing a virgin queen.

When I got the small swarm on Tuesday the 8th, the bees in the box put their rear ends up in the air to signal the rest of the bees that the queen momma was in the box. However, she may not have made the box journey well or she may have been injured in the transfer from cardboard box to hive body.

I opened the small swarm on Friday and there was no sign of laying. The workers were drawing out comb, but syrup was being stored and no eggs were anywhere. This could mean the queen is a virgin queen and won't be laying for a while since she will have to make her mating flight and return safely to the hive.

One way to deal with this is to put a frame of brood and eggs from another hive into this hive. If they need a queen, they can then make one from the eggs. If there is a queen, they won't need to use the eggs to make a queen and the brood that emerges from the borrowed frame will simply enhance the hive.

I wanted to do this and took a frame from Bermuda to add to the small hive. The frame from Bermuda had eggs, young brood, capped brood and three queen cells on it. Two of the queen cells were opened at the bottom, indicating that the queen had emerged. The third cell in the center of the picture was whole.

I chose this frame because of the queen cell, but I don't know if it were a good idea or not. My thought was that if the hive were queenless, they would gain time on getting a new queen because this one would emerge soon. However if there is a queen in the hive, I guess I wasted a perfectly good queen cell. Anyway, I don't know what the answer was to this problem. If I had it to do again, I'd probably only add a frame with brood and eggs.

How to Install a Nuc

In addition to my two hives from last year and the two swarms I have kept of the three that I captured, I had for insurance ordered three nucs for the season. They arrived yesterday and I drove down to Forest Park, Ga to pick them up last night. The nuc comes with a screened front door in a five frame box. You pick the nuc up in the evening so that the bees will be at home. I drove them home, set them in the spots where they will be hived, opened the screened door and that was that for the evening.

The weather this weekend includes rain and cold - actually the rain was supposed to start today, but we were lucky and had sunny weather instead (the better to install nucs with, my dear). I took my prepared box down to the site where the nuc was to be installed. This is a 10-frame deep and the nuc includes four frames so you can see that the box has four frames out of it to accommodate the frames from the nuc.
Here's the nuc still with the top bungee-corded to it, awaiting my transfer to the hive box. When you make the frame transfer, it's essential to put the frames in the same order in which they were in the nuc box. A nuc is made up of four frames from different hives, usually, so as you can see here, the frames were three of wood and one plastic. I set them into the box and then sharply tapped the nuc box over the hive so that the remaining bees would join their sisters.

All the bees never leave the original equipment when you're doing these maneuvers, so you always have to leave the nuc box and any other bee-clinging equipment sitting in front of the hive until all the bees are moved into the hive (that will probably be tomorrow morning.) After the bees calmed down, I put a feeder on each new box.

Thanks to my friend Tracy for the glorious blue and yellow paint. He's building a house and was kind enough to give me quarts of paints that didn't make the cut. I love my blue and yellow hives!

So in case you haven't been counting, I now have seven (7!!!!!) hives. Bermuda who has lived through two winters and is entering her third season, Mellona, entering her second season, two swarm hives, as yet unnamed and now these three nuc installations. I'll be working on Greek and Roman mythology tonight to try to find names for all of these.

Phase Two, Swarm Two

Well, I returned at sunset to find NO bees in the box and all of the bees clumped not on the sheet but on the ground. Obviously I had left the queen on the ground and never got her in the box. So the bees, as one would expect, joined her.

Now the neighbors on both sides of the fence were watching me through their back windows while I struggled with this problem. I turned the box on its side near the bees on the ground. I took the extra piece of cardboard and scraped the pile of bees into the box, hoping that the queen was included. She must have been because the bees began moving in a rather orderly way into the box.
Here they are up close and personal. I used the sheet, the cardboard piece, and my yellow bee brush to aid me in getting the bees in the box. It was tedious, and the sun had already set, so I had to get the job finished and take the bees away. I even went back to the car to get a magazine to give me yet another something to slide ground bees onto. By 8:45 PM all the bees were in the box. I closed it and taped it closed with duct tape.

Before I went back to pick up this swarm, I really studied my bees on my deck. I don't have room for this swarm. I had fun getting it (except for the getting stung part), but I do not need this hive.

I looked at the bee club member list and found the number for my friend Nicky. When I first got my bees she was kind enough to come over and help me to do my first inspection. I have always wanted to do something for her to say thank you.....so I called Nicky. She said that she had had five hives but had lost four of them over the winter. She would be thrilled to have these bees. So as the day ended I delivered these boxed up bees to Nicky's house where she will install them in a hive box. I hope they thrive and that she has fun with them.

Hiving the First Swarm and Phase One of Swarm Two

As with the first swarm I captured, I put this swarm in a medium hive body filled with frames, including one frame of capped honey and several drawn out frames from last year as well as frames with remnants of comb. I set an empty medium over the medium with the frames to keep the bees from spilling out all over the deck as I poured them into the box. I dumped the bees in and left the box upside down on the hive for a moment.

Then they were all in the hive. I put on the inner cover and the telescoping top. I'll take the empty medium off tomorrow. I put a Boardman feeder on the front of the hive and left to go for the second swarm.
The second swarm was not easy AT ALL. As you can see the swarm is on the side of a dogwood tree, pressed up against a hurricane fence. In fact there were bees in the cluster on both sides of the fence. There was nothing to shake and no room for scraping the bees into the cardboard box I brought.

I set the box under the swarm. Then on second thought I put a sheet under the box. I wish I had put another sheet on the other side of the fence, but I didn't. I didn't take any more pictures because I was alone and this swarm was not happy with my intrusion. I got stung at least twice by two bees who got inside my helmet and veil (which was zipped to my suit???) The bees head-butted me and dive bombed me throughout this process.

They were already building comb on the leaf you can see peeking out of the swarm. Every time I thought I had the bees in the box, I'd find that many of them had returned to the tree. I decided that I had not gotten the queen. I began to work on the bees on the sheet and on the ground on the opposite side of the fence. After an hour of fruitless work, I imagined I saw bees with the nasonov signal, so I closed the box except for one opening and left to return at sunset to pick up the bees - which I thought would be comfortably ensconced in the box. (See next post)

Two Swarms in One Day

Last night on my email for this blog, a man who lives near my house wrote me that he had a small swarm in a bush at his house. I decided to go and get it in spite of the fact that Cindy Bee had also called me to get another swarm this morning - talk about biting off more than one can chew! Here are pictures of Mike's swarm which was located in this beautiful shrub at the front corner of his yard.
The bees were not in a position either for me to cut the branch on which they
gathered nor were they on a branch that could be shaken. I put the sheet under the box and used my yellow bee brush to push the bees down into the box, hoping that the queen would be in the first brush's worth of bees.


Sure enough, the bees quickly moved into the box to join the queen and began the nasonov signal to any left out bees. I had the whole swarm in the box within about 25 minutes. I finished just as the garbage truck drove by, pausing to collect the trash without giving me in my space outfit a second glance!

The State of Bee-ing of the Swarm Hive

The swarm hive has cleaned house and now occupies one half of the box they are in. They had a raunchy collection of frames to work with so today I substituted some drawn comb on deep frames from my absconded Proteus hive from last year. I put those frames in the unoccupied section of the hive. The swarm bees were starting to draw wax and have been quite busy.
Bees with pollen laden legs are landing at the swarm hive every few seconds. Seeing this, I felt optimistic, because although this doesn't necessarily mean there's a laying queen and brood who need pollen, it can mean that. At the very least it means the bees are anticipating young if their queen is still a virgin.
I also moved the swarm bees onto the Country Rubes screened bottom board and they seemed quite pleased. I feel much better about their having a screened bottom board.

On this inspection, I didn't look closely at the bees and didn't look for the queen or eggs - I just wanted to see if the bees needed different frames and to see if they were doing bee work in the hive (building wax, making the place their own, etc.).

I also took another unused deep and set up another swarm lure hive. The new swarm hive took over my old swarm lure set-up, so now I have a new one. I put the solid bottom board and the landing stand from the new swarm hive and set them up as the base of this lure hive.

I also did an inspection on Bermuda and Mellona. Both had eggs, young brood, and lots of bees. Bermuda , the oldest of my hives, is burgeoning with bees. But both hives looked really good. Bermuda has four medium boxes on it and brood in every box. Mellona is building up more slowly, but building up all the same. Mellona has bees and brood in three boxes.

I do what's known as unlimited brood nest because I don't use a queen excluder and let the queen lay wherever she wishes.

On an interesting side note - I did not see one single SHB. When I first opened the hives this spring, I saw lots of them. I don't have any traps in the hives at the moment, but there is not a small hive beetle to be seen. I think this is an argument for a strong hive - great bees in charge, no evident hive beetles until at least later in the season.

So much activity in my bee yard!

What Kind of a Place is This?

When I got the swarm yesterday, I didn't have much preparation time for housing them. I already had a swarm lure hive set up on my deck and given the press of time, I decided as I drove home with the bees in the car that the swarm lure hive would be their new home.

I confess, I didn't give them the best room in the house. I had not much hope for the swarm lure, so the hive was set up with a solid bottom board and old frames from the last two years. A few of the frames had comb with wax moth damage. A few of the frames had remnant of comb left from my cutting out wax moth damage. A few frames were completely empty. The last time I opened the swarm lure hive, three huge palmetto roaches ran out - you know the kind - about 2 inches long and fierce looking remnants of the stone age. (They've been around for 300 million years - who is going to argue with them?)

So today the swarm has been cleaning house. They were up and out before either of my established hives to get a jump on the day. You can see the busy housekeeper bees, carrying out all kinds of refuse.


The two bees below are probably saying, "What kind of a place is this?" I'm sure if they could complain, they would report me to the bee landlord association or the board of health.



Tonight I got home after dark and went outside to take a picture of the hive. Look at the housekeeping progress that has been made! They have swept the landing deck almost completely clean and made neat piles of trash on the deck below the hive.



They are probably making wax - the Boardman feeder was completely full yesterday so they are sucking down the sugar water - a good sign of wax production.



I have a good screened bottom board for this hive - I'll put it on when I open up the hive on Sunday or so. It's a Country Rubes Board and may make up for my giving them a less than decent place to live at the beginning!

I Captured a Swarm!

Cindy Bee (Ga Beekeeper of the Year 2006) keeps a swarm catcher list. I never got a call last year but today I did!

I was driving to work, feeling a little down because I only had appointments at 9 and 10 this morning and then nothing else until late this afternoon. As I pulled into the parking lot, my cell rang and it was Cindy - she had a swarm for me in an office complex parking lot near my house.

I called the woman who reported the swarm and told her I couldn't get there until 11:30, but I would be there then. Then I went to work and hoped, hoped, hoped the bees would still be there at 11:30. The bees had first been spotted last night, so I'm sure they were about ready to move on.

At 11 I raced home, grabbed my pruning shears (she said they were in a small tree), a large cardboard box, a sheet, some tape, my bee brush, my gloves, two bandanas (to keep my helmet from slipping over my eyes!) and then found that my beesuit was wet in the washing machine. I threw it in the dryer for a few minutes while I packed the car.

It was raining when I arrived in my still-damp beesuit. But the bees were the easiest to get in the world. They were a small swarm on a drooping branch on a tree. Because of the rain a number of bees were also clustered on the juniper bushes below.

Cindy told me to put a sheet under the cardboard box and then shake the bees in. I tried to put the sheet on the tops of the juniper bushes, but it was difficult. The box I set right under the bees. I had to work around parked cars and these ^$^#^^%$ juniper bushes.

I shook the swarm from the four different branches on which it was located into the box and then cut some of the juniper out from the area below and shook those bees into the box. I waited about 45 minutes for the bees to find the box. Several put their rear ends up and started the nasonov dance so I felt pretty sure the queen was in the box.

The bees kept me company in the car and were all over the back window. When I popped the back of the car and took out the box, I moved really slowly so that those loose bees might feel inclined to come along.

Cindy had told me to take an empty hive body and set it over the hive body full of frames in which the new bees would live. That would serve as a funnel for the bees to get them on top of the frames in the box below.

I turn into a complete nervous wreck doing something like this, so bees were not only in the hive box funnel but in a pile on the deck in front of the box. For the life of me, I don't know how I could miss such a big target, but I did. I was afraid the queen might be in the clump on the deck so I slid those onto a piece of cardboard and dumped them into the box.

I hope I didn't injure the queen in my awkward transfer from box to hive, but it is accomplished and the bees are orienting and I'm happy.

Josie, the lady who reported the swarm, was kind enough to take pictures of the removal. She got stung in the process. I hated that - bees were swarming all over me and I didn't get stung even once, so I felt bad for her.

Great day not to be busy at work! I hope these girls are happy in their new box (the one I had set out for a swarm lure).