Yesterday morning I was back tending to the big swarm from the previous post, moving the remaining clustered bees to near the box entrance.\u00a0 Just as they were all going in, I noticed an unusual number of bees in the air by our other hives.\u00a0 I wish I had taken a video, as I soon found a conveyor belt of bees pouring out of hive #2B. For a few short minutes they were all in the air, and I stood in the center of cloud of thousands of bees.\u00a0 Then the queen must have landed on a branch, and they all followed, forming a cluster of about volleyball size.\u00a0 I would say only about half to 2\/3 the size of the swarm the previous day.<\/p>\n
This was an easy capture, as they settled at eye level on a branch about 2″ in diameter.\u00a0 I pulled the swarm trap off of our roof, trimmed off side branches, cut the main branch on both sides of the swarm, and got 75% of the bees in with one shake.\u00a0 The rest followed quickly, and they seem to have accepted their new home.<\/p>\n
And then there were 11.<\/p>\n
This is not a hive I expected to swarm.\u00a0 Hive 2 had an underperforming queen, so we split it, moving the box with the queen away and attempting to requeen the remaining box with a purchased queen.\u00a0 They killed her and created emergency cells, and the new queens should be emerging right about now.\u00a0 The population was perhaps a bit high for one box, as bees from the other half of the split drifted back to the original site, but it didn’t seem too packed and I had given them an empty frame in the center to keep the broodnest open.<\/p>\n
I think, like #6B the day before, that a sudden influx of bees from the shaken-out laying worker hive pushed the population over the swarm threshold, which combined with multiple queens emerging allowed them to fly the coop.<\/p>\n
With all of these splits, I have to temporarily retire my hive organization diagrams in favor of a different sort, tracing the lineage of our various colonies.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Only the green-filled hives have a laying queen at the moment; all of the yellow colonies have queen cells or virgins.\u00a0 Here’s hoping for successful mating.\u00a0 The weather couldn’t be better.<\/p>\n