Month: May 2021

We had checked on this hive two week ago. The queen was laying a full brood pattern and there were about 6 frames full of capped brood. If we did not split them, I fear they would indeed swarm on their onw. So, we caught the queen and moved her over to a new location with her own deep from the original hive. I shook a few frames into the original hive and made sure the original box had fresh eggs and 1-3 day old larva. This queen was sourced from a wild swarm catch on the campus about 3 years ago. She actually appeared to have been a failed queen but a new location solved the problem.

The original double deep yellow hive body was split into two. The original bottom yellow box stayed in place. The top yellow box with the queen went to the corner and is now the Yellow Orange hive body.

I was informed of a swarm through an online neighborhood messaging. We went over and quickly began work removing the bees. In hindsight the bees were much to high up for us to safely catch. In the end we did manage to catch the swarm but I would never do that again. I should be more careful.

Ultimately because of the bees being just out reach, tucked tightly in the tree borough, and not on a “shakable” branch, I decided to mount a NUC box up in the tree. The bees promptly marched into the box in about 20 minutes.

I installed kept the colony locked up until the next morning. During the morning hours when the temperatures were low around 55, I transferred the frames into the plastic hive. The plastic hive has queen excluders on the entrance, so I made sure the workers could travel but the queen would remain. The chance of leaving is small, the plastic hive has fully drawn out old brood frames with several full resource frames from last years dead out.

The owner of the property called be back the next day and asked if I would come back by to retrieve a few bees which were lost of the swarm. It is typical for bees to become lost during a swarm and not make it into the “catch”. Normally the bees will either go back to the original hive, join another hive or die off. I ran back over with a homemade bee-vac and gently removed them from the kids tree house. We will add these bees to a weak hive during the dark hours of night.

Both Warre hives were inspected. The split colony has made a new queen and the queen successfully mated. Eggs and larva were seen. The queen was seen. The colony has huge amounts of entrance traffic and is doing very well.

The original queen split is not doing as well. The numbers are just not very good. The queen is laying and there is brood however, they do not have enough bees to thrive. Must remember to add more bees next time. I: took one box off of the original colony and did a newspaper combine to add more numbers.

A package of bees was purchased from “To Bee Or Not To Bee”. The package has one italian queen. The package was healthy and a good size.

The over winter hive was also briefly inspected. I did not have any smoke or bee protection. So I simply peaked inside to see what the spring numbers looked like. The numbers were ok. Not great, but ok.

The queen cages were removed from all the new hives. All the queens had escaped and were loose in the hive. The two overwintered hives were inspected. The double deep yellow is packed with capped brood and will need to be split soon. The Triple deep green hive is full of bees but no capped brood.

That time of year again. We installed 4 packages from Dakota Bees at the Corona street property. Excellent day followed by an afternoon and next full day of hard rain. The bees should be spending that time setting up the new hive.

Each hive was setup in a 8 frame deep. Previous years brood frames and one resource frame was put into each hive body. The queens were installed as usual and the hives were dumped as usual. The hive bodies were closed up right before the storms and the entrance reducers put on.