Swarm!!!
I no sooner get my bee journal updated and my husband comes in the house and tells me he thinks one of the hives is swarming. So I went out to the apiary and before I even got there I could see a swarm had begun clumping in a tree just above the new hives. I was pretty sure which hive was swarming and I was right. That hive seemed rowdier than the other one when we initially installed the two new nucs as well as during the first hive check. Plus they had built a huge line of comb under one of the frames but it didn’t look like any swarm cells were developing there. Besides, we’d only had them a couple of weeks when we did that hive check. Odd that they’d swarm like this but I suppose it happens.
The coolest part was scooping up a bunch of nurse bees from the ground with my hands. They can’t really fly well when they’re young, and I put a board up for them to climb up to the hive. They’re so sweet and adorable and it’s an honor to help them up to the hive.
We started with existing comb so they could begin right away increasing the colony and then had to add new empty frames within a couple of weeks, so it’s not surprising that the hive got a little crazy. But this is a sign of a really healthy hive, so the new one should be excellent. When we dumped them in the nuc, we had frames with existing comb along with a frame of honey from last year. We’ll keep them away from the apiary for a while and then transfer them to our original horizontal hive. But we may move that one farther away from where it is now, possibly into the backyard. We have a nice place right next to the pond and it would be perfect for them. I posted some video on my YouTube channel, but I’m posting them here as well.
We have swarm boxes up, in fact, the nuc box we put the swarm in is actually a swarm box and it’s cool when you get some free bees. That’s not what happened here technically because the swarm is from one of our own hives, but at least they didn’t go flying away to someone else’s property.
I posted some video on my YouTube channel, but I’m posting them here as well. Swarms are so cool!
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Thank you... Jan Erickson
