… 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.

Mothers Day Swarm

It’s been an exciting day.

The plans were to get up, watch some Premier League Football, have breakfast, go for a bike ride with Darling Daughter, visit the Aged Mother, and return for a lazy evening at home.

But our plans took a detour after the football game when I glanced outside at the bees as I prepared for my bike ride. There was a cloud of them swirling around outside one of the hives, with some clustered at the bottom.

They were swarming.

This photo doesn’t do justice to what it looked like.

Meanwhile a chipmunk sat on our deck, apparently thinking, “What the f—?”

Photo courtesy of The Engineer

The swarm was also on one of the lids for our septic system with a bee ball hanging from both our rhododendron and one of our roses, pulling the branches nearly to the ground.

It was quite convenient for us, all things considered — no high trees to scale or branches to cut in order to rehive them.

We took the empty box we had set on the picnic table to use tomorrow to split our most recently inspected hive, set it under the rose bush, and shook the bee ball off and into the box. Then we moved the box under the rhododendron and did the same for that bee ball. Lastly, we began scooping the bees up into the box.

I think the queen was in one of the balls because the bees on the ground began to move inside.

The whole process from discovery to being able to move the box to the picnic table took about forty-five minutes.

By afternoon, they were apparently cleaning out the frames in their new home.

Photo by The Engineer

Also, the hive that swarmed was one that we’d already split, so we still need to deal with the one that seemed to be prepping to swarm, which will involve spending more money on boxes and frames.

In summary, we now have The Palace (which has a queen) and The Palace’s split (which we are hoping is requeening) on the far left and second from left, respectively. Next we have the split from the hive that just swarmed, which we now know doesn’t have a queen because its mother hive just swarmed, and hives don’t swarm without a queen — that’s the tall, skinny, pink one. We have the now-queenless mother hive that just swarmed (fourth from the left) and the swarmed hive which apparently has the queen (far right). And we have the hive we plan to split because of the many queen cups we saw last week (second wood box from right). The yellow and brown box is a nuc box just in case anyone else feels like swarming and wants to make it easy for us.

Links to swarm videos:

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This one you have to click through for some reason — You’ll have to ask WordPress why. I’m pretty sure I uploaded both the same way: https://www.instagram.com/p/CdUNPIipEL2/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

As for that bike ride with Darling Daughter — it was lovely, as was our late lunch afterwards. And Aged Mother was as feisty as ever, surrounded by many cards, flowers, and chocolate.