Staying ahead of your bees is essential to swarm control. This year, I have diligently worked my production hives every week leading up to our main nectar flow, balancing, equalizing, and more or less pestering my bees into staying put. My general strategy is to confuse the bees so much they can’t make adequate preparations to relocate. So far, it has seemed to work, although it has been a lot of work, hence my sore back.
Last year, I got behind my bees and could never get caught back up. It seemed like a daily mass migration of bees left my bee yard, only stopping long enough in a tree top to say goodbye, before they sailed off into the horizon in search for a new land of nectar and honey.
So this year, I have redoubled my efforts to stay ahead of my bees and it seems to be paying dividends. Supers are filling up, despite the severe drought we’re currently in. Honestly, so far, I think the drought has actually been good for the honey crop because there has been no rain or storms to wash out and demolish the fragile poplar blooms. But if the drought persists it will no doubt cut the nectar flow short, so I’m still hoping for some rain.
Here is a picture of Thomas in his bee suit. He got to be my helper on Saturday, and he did a good job working the smoker. Then he contented himself with making wax balls and wax worms out of fresh burr comb. Apparently, beeswax is nature’s Play-Doh.
Despite the drought, and the craziness of swarm season, these are good times.
Good job on getting ahead of the curve! And it’s great to see you are including the little guy in the work. Future beekeeper of America!
We seem to find ourselves behind that curve every year, but this year was meant to be different. Although you are ahead on the warm weather, the dandelions here are now in full bloom and the flowering trees have started blooming. Within the next week or so, everything will be out.
With this in mind, we split two of our four hives on Friday. No queen cells in either, but lots drones walking around and queen cups. Congratulating ourselves on being ahead, we planned to split one more this week and check on our long hive. We added about five empty frames to the long hive a few weeks ago because the queen was laying like crazy.
You can guess what happened. They swarmed. Oddly, they swarmed to under their hive, so we went out and put them in a deep. It was evening when we found them, and the next morning, the box was almost empty. Figuring we needed to check the mother hive, we removed the foam box we had around it from the winter (we’ve had 20 and 30 degree nights within the last week and were reluctant to take it off too soon). The whole swarm was clustered on between the foam box and the hive, and they weren’t very interested in the hive box we’d made for them.
Our theory is the queen went back in the original hive or was somehow lost. She’s marked and we couldn’t see her anywhere in the bees.
So, today, once the rain passes, we have to go out and assess that hive. Whether they have a queen or not, they will need to be split. That’s assuming there are queen cells (there must be, right?) or eggs to split with.
Beekeeping. It’s never boring.
I’ve had that happen a time or two over the years. I’ve always wondered if maybe bees were doing a dry run for real swarm or maybe something went wrong and they aborted. I would assume there would probably be swarm cells in there, but if not they should make some emergency cells as long as they have eggs. I would just move a frame of eggs over to the new split just to make sure they have something in case the old queen got lost or something and isn’t with the new swarm.
Yep, bees are never boring, especially this time of year!
I thought to do the same and 2 weeks ago made my first split. Sad to say, no go. Between an abrupt cold snap and my own mistake of probablynot transferring enough bees to stay warm, they perished. Better luck next week, I hope! Your boy sure is a cutie in his suit!
Yeah, splits this time of year can be kind of touch or go, especially if the new split is in the same bee yard. I made several splits a few weeks ago, and had one that did the same exact thing, so it happens. Hopefully, one next week will work out!
That photo of Thomas is previous- thank you!