The Strange Swarm of Yesterday

Yesterday's swarm from the old hive was strange. The bees bolted out of the hive as usual and swarmed around our backyard and that of the neighbor's. But it seemed like the bees couldn't decide where to form a cluster. Some were on the bush in the neighbor's yard where they went to during the previous swarm, some where on on ivy bush that grows over the fence that separates the two yards, some were on the top bar hive (TBH) and seemed to be going inside, and a group favoured the wooden nuc box of Alan's. We saw lots of fanning as if the various groups of bees were trying to signal that they had found the best spot. As always there were bees fanning at the entrance to the old hive trying to get everybody to come back home. In the end the bees chose the TBH, mainly the right hand side entrance where the bees ended up in the previous swarm. We are not sure what happens to the queen in a situation like this. Does she also go into the hive and fight it out with the resident queen?

If you remember, the previous swarm ended up moving in with the TBH, but that time after forming a cluster and being placed in a nuc box. The swarms are getting smaller in volume each time and apparently getting tied of doing the whole swarming routine.

Here's a closeup movie of the swarm in action.... you can kind of get a sense of the speed that the bees are leaving at...


Here's one of Jessica as she chats about where the bees are going:


Here's Jessica summarizing what happened in the end:


The following is a summary of the swarms that have happened so far. This is more for my memory than for anything else:-

1st swarm: from the old hive - swarm placed in right hand side of the top bar hive
2nd and 3rd swarms: simultaneously from both the old and new hives - joined larger swarm placed in the left hand side of the TBH
4th swarm: from the old hive - swarm placed in wooden nuc box but 30 minutes later the bees leave and mostly go in the right side of TBH
5th swarm: from the old hive - swarm never gathered anywhere all together but in patches in several different places. Eventually all the bees again went into the TBH, mostly on the right side.

So, with all the merging that's been going on we only have two extra colonies even though we've done 1 split and had 5 swarms.

Another Swarm

We've just had another swarm! It started about 30 minutes ago.

No swarms today

The temperature didn't get into the 60s today and the bees were pretty quiet. No swarms but we fully expect one from the old hive when they get a warm day. The queens were piping in that hive all day.

Another Swarm Watch Day

It's cold (50 F), windy and cloudy in Livermore this morning. From the weather forecast it looks like it's not going to brighten up all day and it may even rain later. Hopefully the cold weather will prevent another swarm as the old hive still seems to want to continue the same routine. I heard multiple queens piping again in that hive. Thankfully the new hive (the split) is quiet.

The new swarm moves in with its neighbours

The swarm that Adam and I just collected in a wooden nuc box stayed inside the box for about 30 minutes before they decided to leave. I thought they were going to swarm again but instead they decided to move in with their neighbours in the adjacent top bar hive. At first, there was a mass of bees in the air, bees on the top and sides of the top bar hive, and a jam of bees at the right hand side entrance. I couldn't decide if the bees inside were happy with the situation but over about one hour all the bees moved inside. I've just checked inside the nuc box and it's pretty much empty. It has been another unpredictable day with the bees.

The 3rd Swarm from the Old Hive

The old hive swarmed again. Just a little one which landed on a tree branch in our other neighbour's yard. Adam was here at the time and we managed to easily collect the bees in a wooden nuc box.

Here's Adam showing off his filming skills....


This one shows Adam getting togged up to move the bees...

Will the Hives Swarm Again?

We are getting used to the fact that our hives just seem to want to swarm at the moment. The 'old' hive has swarmed twice and the 'new' hive once, and our tally of beehives has increased from one to four in a week. The question is will they swarm again today? I've just listened to the hives and I can hear multiple piping from the old hive and the new hive seems quiet. Could the old hive really swarm for a third time......?

Question of the Day

To confirm, both hives ('old' and 'new') swarmed simultaneously to the same spot in Chad's backyard that the old hive swarmed to yesterday. We collected the swarm and put it in a cardboard nuc box on top of the uninhabited left-hand side of the top bar hive. (The left and right sides of the top bar are separated by a follower board and can temporarily be used as two separate hives). We're now weighing our options: Keep them in the nuc box and sell them? or put them in the other side of the top bar?

Selling them is quick and easy. Putting them in the top bar commits us to either making another top bar or combining the two colonies at some point in the future. We are a little worried that the hives are weakening themselves with repeated swarms, and keeping this swarm would give us the option of re-combining the colonies if either one begins to struggle. 

At the end of the day my parents stopped by to check out all the bees and the new top bar hive in action. Here's a photo of me, Carol and Al (Master Woodworker).

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You can also see the white cardboard nuc box sitting on top of the top bar hive.

Click on the link for the movies from day........

More Swarms!!!

The new hive started to swarm and the old hive decided to join in for its first after-swarm!!!! We think that the two swarms have merged and are now on the same post as yesterday. Not sure if that's possible but that's what seems to have happened. More later.

The new hive has come alive

The new hive has suddenly come alive. We have a few dozen bees outside the hive. We are not sure if they are just orienting themselves or preparing to swarm!

Update

It's 66 F right now.

I'm sitting in the backyard in a sunny spot right among our three hives. The old hive is humming along with foragers coming and going, bringing in pollen--basically business as usual. The only oddity is that we are still hearing at least two queens tooting and quacking away. We might be in for another swarm!

The new hive seems to be struggling a bit. They are kicking out dead drones by the tens, no one is foraging and we've only seen a small hand full of bees coming and going. After giving them a few days to get their act together, we decided that it was time to give them some food today (1:1 sugar:water). I suspect that they ended up with a good chunk of the drone brood from the complete hive when we split it and that the majority of the worker bees that came along and stayed were nurse bees. The drones are dying off because of the mites, which we are not yet sure we want to treat. We think the bees may be exhibiting hygenic behavior by ridding the hive of the drones, and we'd like to give them a chance to turn the situation around before medicating. We've also heard that a break in brood cycle caused by splitting the hives can get the mites under control as well. The nurse bees should be turning foragers any time now, so they should start bringing in some food. This hive is still tooting and quacking as well!

The top bar is just plain fascinating. We put windows on the hive so that we can look in on the bees from time to time. We couldn't resist a look today. They were clumped up around the entrance holes in the top for most of the morning. Now they are starting to leave the hive and orient. Entering through wine-cork-sized holes in the side of the hive rather than a nice long slot with a ramp presents a steep learning curve, but they are figuring it out. We also laid under the hive and looked up through the screened bottom. We saw two dead queens! I sure hope a third queen was hiding somewhere in the masses of the swarm.

We've actually found four dead queens now. There are the two I just mentioned as well as two that we found on the flight deck of the old hive. The first one I found had a torn wing, which Alan suggested might have resulted from the fight that cost her her life. The others have seemed completely intact. Tell tale signs of fighting are missing antenae and torn wings.

The Swarm: A Summary (kind of)

From the beginning, I have thought of the bees as teachers. They teach the obvious lessons about honey bees and social insects, but they also teach lessons about impermanence, reality, flexibility and diligence--lessons that we all (and I especially) need to learn over and over again.

We did everything we could to stop those bees from swarming. We split the colony, we put two swarm lures in the yard, and we did a lot of hoping that they wouldn't swarm. And then I started to believe that they wouldn't swarm. Of course, I had read that colonies could swarm even if they didn't have a mated queen--they would just take a whole bunch of virgin queens with them and then sort out the situation when they had settled into a new home. Now, if our hive, with 15 virgin queens, wasn't a prime candidate for just such a scenario, I'm not sure such a hive exists. Yet I, purely out of wishful thinking, convinced myself that they wouldn't--just because I didn't want them to. In fact, before this past week, I had convinced myself that it was easy to keep a colony from swarming and that we would never have to take bees out of our neighbor's trees. We would just split the hives long before swarming was even a possibility.

Lesson One: Hoping does not make something so, and things rarely turn out the way you think they will.

Around 11:30 this morning Tim called me at work and calmly told me that the bees were swarming. His voice was so calm that I didn't believe him. But soon I could tell he was serious. Jamie (wonderful Jamie) agreed to do my one urgent work item for the day, and I was out the door like lightning.

Once home, I found Tim in the backyard watching a loosely defined cloud of bees move toward a post in the neighbor's backyard, where they were regrouping. At the entrance to the parent hive, small clusters of bees hung above the entrance and under the flight deck. About ten bees were fanning at the entrance. We wondered if they were trying to help lost bees find their way home by wafting the hive scent.

Having never met our neighbor, and assuming he was unaware of our bee habit, we were pretty nervous about telling him that our little friends were trying to make his backyard their new home. Our fear vanished as soon as we met Chad. He was just about as kind, welcoming and not-freaked-out as we can imagine anyone being.

At this point I have to tell you that not every swarm you come across is going to be hanging like low fruit on a branch just waiting to drop into an open box with a quick shake. Our bees, for instance, had chosen to congregate on the front left post of an arbor, which was covered in vines. It made the situation a little tricky. We were fortunate that it was only about five feet off the ground.

We set to work immediately trying to tempt the bees away from the post with some drawn out comb that Alan lent us. They didn't take the bait. Next we tried shaking them into the nuc box with some success. Finally we tried brushing them. In the end, it was a combination of brushing and shaking that gave us the best results.

Once we got a good number of bees in the nuc, we set it on the ground, thinking that the remaining bees would follow their sisters in, which they slowly did. The bees that had entered the nuc box were fanning like crazy. At this point, we began wondering where the queen was--in or out of the box. And then we spotted her right next to the entrance. We tried catching her, but she flew off. I was worried that she had gone forever, but then I saw another queen and then another!! One of them went into the box. The other one we caught in a jam jar. We put the nuc box up higher, closer to where the remaining bees were, and over the course of about twenty minutes, they all went in.

Later in the afternoon, Tim brought the nuc box home and shook the bees into our waiting top bar. He added the queen from the jam jar too. May the best woman win.

The bees were incredibly gentle through the whole process. We were each stung twice, but that was due to our being under-dressed.

Lesson Two: Persevere.

You must persevere when catching a swarm. About half-way through the procedure, I lost heart. I couldn't tell if the bees were moving into the box or not, I thought we'd lost the queen and I'd been stung. I knew we had to get the bees out of Chad's yard, but I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do it. This is where it becomes incredibly important to have a partner--Tim never gave up and he kept me trying. It was so worth it!

We are now the proud parents of three hives, and we are keeping an open mind about what may come next.

A side note: At complete odds with the previously cited anecdotal evidence that bees are swarming early this year, Alan hasn't seen any swarm potential in his Brentwood or Tracy apiaries. And last month, we heard sad stories from fellow beekeepers about hives dying over the winter. From these reports, it seems that our colony is an anomaly. Alan suggested that we might have a warm little microclimate in our backyard, created by the gravel (no plants) absorbing solar and radiating it back into the air.


It's now time for some movies!

Here is Jessica starting to collect the swarm:



We tried shaking them out:



The bees finally start to head into the nuc box:



Raider tidies up the stragglers:



Jessica chats about the swarm catching:

The bees are in their new home

I've just transfered the bees from the nuc box they were collected in and transfered them to Jessica's new top bar hive. I just tipped them in and it seems like they are settling in OK.

The bees leaving the hive!

I was lucky enough to be around when the bees decided to swarm out of the hive and I caught it on video. The whole event took maybe 20 minutes and was pretty unbelievable. The bees were pouring out of the hive and it almost seemed like the sky darkened.... OK maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but there were a lot of bees flying.

Here's some of the video.....






We have also just collected the bees from our neighbor's yard!!! I'll let Jessica tell you about that later.

The bees have swarmed!!!!!

The bees have just swarmed out of the old hive and landed in the backyard of our neighbor!!!! More to follow!!!!