… and a Bonus Swarm

Today, I came home from my morning walk to find The Engineer replacing the tubes in both my bike tires. They blew out yesterday while the bicycle was sitting in my hot car. I’d filled them to the psi listed on the tire, which turned out to be the maximum. And it was cold when I filled them and hot in the car. Air expands, so …

A little later, when I went inside to make some breakfast, I looked out at the hives, and darned if the same one wasn’t swarming again, only this time they hadn’t gotten past the hanging off the front of the hive.

Here’s the Instagram video of what it looked like.

“No problem,” I thought, “we’ve handled this before,” and I told The Engineer not to worry, I’d put on my suit and scoop them into the box we’d set out yesterday.

And that’s what I did.

A little later, The Engineer decided it was getting confusing keeping track of what hive spawned what split/swarm. He numbered them and marked which we knew had queens.

Then, before we left to go buy more boxes and frames, it looked like that hive might be thinking about swarming it again. We set our only remaining box in front of the colony to encourage them to settle there if they did, but on return, it doesn’t look like they’ve swarmed.

Now, we have (from left to right) Hive 1A, Hive 1 (bearding pretty heavily, but they don’t have a queen so in theory they shouldn’t swarm), Hive 2A, Hive 2, Hive 3, Hive/Nuc 2C, Hive 2B.

We are giving today’s swarm, Hive/Nuc2C to our friend MJ to try her hand at. She’ll need to check it in 10-15 days to see if there are eggs. If there are, the queen has mated and all is fine. If it isn’t, MJ may need to buy a queen, but that’s still significantly cheaper than buying a package or Nuc.

Tomorrow, we plan to split Hive 3 and put a different setup on the first swarm’s hive — trying to get them to make honey in jars.

Just another day in the life of two beekeepers during swarm season.