Thursday, June 19, 2008

Swarms!

Mike Hanley had a swarm leave his hive today (Thursday June 19). You can see them in the photo, spread around in the apple bush. Mike - tell us how the hiving went, OK? Jenny Molesworth had a swarm a day or two ago, too. Did they go back in their box, Jen?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I was in the end stages of assembling another hive box to transfer them but unfortunately they decided to leave the apple tree to whose knows where? It's ok because I checked my existing hive and I still have tons of bees and lots of honey being produced. The strange thing about this is that I have had a super on my hive for two weeks now and I think they had lots of room. The super still has no honey. Go figure.

Jen said...

My bees went back in the hive but today a bunch left again and then swarmed back onto the hive and then went back in. I looked inside and there were around 10 queen cells. I think I may not have a queen any more - although she was there 2 weeks ago. Dave said I should kill all the queen cells except one in case I don't have a queen. I removed the queen cells and set them aside. When I was done one of the queens had emerged - she flew away. Another one was in process and emerged while I was watching - I couldn't kill her and so I put her in the hive - Now I have a queen - hopefully not two; Dave and Craig are cringing. The hive that this is happening to is the weaker of the two - the bees have barely moved into the 2nd super - so I moved a bottom frame of bees up to move more bees upstairs. It was amazing how mellow the bees were while I was rooting around them and destroying there young queens.

heidi said...

I wonder if i had a swarm ( i guess many of us have that fear every now and again. I put on a super on each hive a week or so again. This week one hive is all moved into the super, while the other is still only half way through the brood box, and there seem to be much fewer bees in the hive. In this hive, there is only honey and capped honey in the second brood box. Could the queen only be in the bottom box or should she have moved up by now?
I also cleaned up a big blob forming between some frames, and I brought it up to show Eric the amazing site of watching the bees being born. While I was happily watching and munching on honey, he was sad that all these drone ( it was starnge all the bees were drones here) were not with their hive. I couldn't bring myself to tell hime what will happen to them this fall.