Summer means Swarms!

So my bees swarmed on May 15th this year. Even though I split the hive, I didn't have enough drawn out deep frames so, the frames that I put back in were just foundation. This didn't help with the space issue and so my bees swarmed. I got a call around lunch time from my wife asking me if I had time to come home because the bees were buzzing around like crazy and were really loud. I knew right then and there that they were swarming. So, I told her to try to watch to see where they would land. Unfortunately, the buggers landed super high up in a tree in my yard. I'm talking 60-100 feet up. There was no way that I would be able to reach those bees.  So I've decided that I've got to set up a bait hive a bit lower in the trees in order to help catch future swarms. I think there was a large swarm and a small after swarm. They swarmed on a Tuesday. I kept checking to see how long it would take the swarm to move on. They were still there Wednesday and that Wednesday night it got pretty cold. I thought for sure that I'd find dead bees below where the swarm had been hanging out, but nope. They were fine. However, they didn't take off for wherever it was that they found for their new home until sometime late Saturday or early Sunday morning. This either means that 1) it was hard to find a decent place near where I live or 2) there were multiple competing options that may have interested the swarm and so it took a bit longer to reach a consensus on which spot to ultimately choose. I'm reading Honeybee Democracy and so it was cool to have a swarm to be able to reference to. 

I've also been receiving some calls for collecting swarms. So if you live in Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, University Heights, Beachwood, or the surrounding area and you see a swarm of bees and would like someone to remove it for you without killing the bees give me a call: Justin: 801.783.9256 honeybee swarm removal. I even built a swarm bucket with a 10 ft pole to help with reaching high swarms. It still wouldn't have reached my super high one, but with a ladder and the swarm bucket I could get some high ones. I bet I'll eventually build a bee-vac but that's for another year. Unfortunately, every time I've gone out the swarm has already left or the swarm has left before I've been able to get home from work. None of them waited it out as long as mine did, perhaps because mine was so high up in the trees, they felt like they could take their time. The good thing is that I still have plenty of bees in my main hive. However, the swarm left that main colony queenless. When I inspected the bees following the swarm, the hive was incredibly nervous and quick to fly and angry (many stingers in the gloves). So I had my wife pick up an Italian queen from a beekeeper in a nearby city. I got a decent price: $20. I haven't checked since I requeened, but just from the entrance behavior of the bees, I'm fairly confident that she took. I've got a queen excluder on right now with an Imrie shim above it. The Imrie shim is supposed to give the bees an upper entrance to the honey supers. I'm thinking of adding another one as well. I'm excited to see how the honey is going. I'm anticipating that the three supers that I have on now should be moving along fairly well with the capping of the honey.

I've been feeding the hive that I split. The cool thing was that when I had gone through after the split and sought to remove swarm cells in the large hive, I kept killing the swarm cells. Well, one of the last ones I opened just to see how far along the queen was and the queen literally crawled out of the cell. She started racing along my glove and so I quickly moved her over to the split that I had made the day before and placed her in there. When I later inspected, I saw a beautiful queen laying. She must have taken! Gone out and mated with nearby drones and come back to start hive number 2. I later moved them from the nuc and they are now in a 10 frame Langstroth in a single deep. My plan is to keep 2 hives and a nuc as an emergency queen raising machine. I'm hoping to catch a swarm for the nuc sometime this summer. Hopefully someone calls again.