Swarm 2016...and away we go for another season!

Hi all, hope you had a great winter! We had a mild one in Philadelphia. I went into winter with 7 hives and 5 of them survived. Now they are all building up as the weather has really warmed up in the past week and there are tons of flowers in bloom.

The other day there was a post on the Philly Bee Keepers Facebook page about a swarm in Northeast Philly. I jumped at the chance to grab it. The car was packed with swarm catchin' gear and I headed up to my old stomping grounds to go capture the swarm. But, I broke one of the cardinal rules of swarm catching - I didn't get last minute confirmation that the swarm was still there (I tried but couldn't get a hold of anyone). Lo and behold, got there and the bees had left already! Damn - no free bees today! Fortunately, I got a call from the same guy the next day and there was another swarm in the same exact place! I had told him they might throw a secondary swarm and if they did to call me. The parent colony is living in the building not 25 feet from where the swarms landed.

So I headed out again, this time with my trusty assistant Jonah and we captured that swarm! And we even saw the queen. Here are some pics and video.

A lovely little swarm!

My assistant saying hi to the girls!

In this video you can see when I found the queen. After removing a small branch, there she was - right in front of my face. I managed to get her on my pruners.

What was that I said about queens being unlikely to fly away???

Fortunately she didn't get away. She went back into the swarm to the safety of her daughters! It is nice to be able to contain the queen, because that really ensures that the swarm won't go anywhere once you set them up in a new hive. Sometimes a swarm will leave a new hive once it is set up and opened. I have had that happen only once. If you keep the queen contained for a day or two while the bees get settled in, it greatly improves the chances that they will stay.

Jonah being very brave

We got all of the bees into the box and sealed them up. All in all it was a very easy swarm capture and the bees were super gentle. It was great to have Jonah there helping, he was into it. According to the guy who called me, the bees have been living there at least 4 years, so it seems like they will be good genetic stock. We'll see how they do!

Girls are all sealed up ready to go home

Update - Here they are settling in to their new home at Woodford Mansion...

And one final update - I checked on them one week after installing them at Woodford. Saw the queen and she is laying eggs nicely. So far so, good...

"I Love Trash..."

I think that most of us probably remember this...

Well, this past week I met some bees who also love trash. Got a call from a woman who had been away for 2 weeks and returned home to find some bees living in her trash can. This is what I found when I arrived...

Bees attached comb to trash can lid

Well, I'll be! I guess the bees don't care too much about where they make their home! You can see the trash bag in the can, the can was practically full of trash and the bees had very little space. But that didn't stop them from settling in. Makes me laugh when I think about how people will argue over which kind of bee hive is best for the bees - Langstroth hive, Top Bar hive, Warre hive, Golden Mean hive - well, I think I'm gonna start marketing the "Rubbermaid Trash Can Hive" (comes with trash)!

I decided that instead of doing the removal in this little courtyard, I would take the entire trash can lid, comb and all, and bring it to one of my apiaries so that I could relax and take my time and set the hive up immediately. Here's how I transported the lid (what else would I use in this case, but a trash bag)...

The second part of the video shows me placing a nuc on top of the trash can in order to collect all of the foragers that were out working when I relocated their home. I went back the following night and collected the nuc. It worked beautifully.

I brought the bees to my apiary in Francisville where I had an empty hive looking for some new bees. I turned the lid upside down and started to gently remove the fragile comb.

Most of the comb removed

My work station, on top of an empty top bar hive

Placing comb in the hive

My queen luck has been very good lately and that trend continued. I was able to find and cage the queen in this hair clip style queen cage. There are a few workers in with her. Caging the queen helps to ensure that the bees won't up and leave their new home. I will leave her in the cage for a day or two and then let her out so she can get to work.

Queen at the bottom, the one with long slender abdomen

Queen cage is under that mass of bees

Here I moved the queen cage down in between the frames

So that was basically it. I closed up the bees and left them alone. That was the quickest and easiest removal job I have ever done! I'm lovin' it!

First Swarm of the Year, North Philly

I got an early birthday gift (the day before my bday) from the Queen Bee Goddess. She sent me a beautiful swarm. Thanks to Alison for reaching out to the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild about the swarm in her yard (and for taking video). And thanks to Russ for helping me catch the swarm. I was able to find and cage the queen, which helped make the swarm capture very easy because the workers all followed the scent of the queen whom was placed in the swarm box. After catching the swarm I took it home and set it up on the roof. Have a look...
 

UPDATE: I released the queen today (May 20th) and the worker bees quickly proceeded to kill her! I believe that she was the old queen and she was probably well past her prime. I was able to find another queen in the hive and she appeared to be younger and maybe even a virgin. I will give them a few weeks and check for signs of a laying queen. It is not that unusual for a swarm to have more than one queen, like an insurance policy until they get settled into a new home.

First Honey Bee Swarm of the Year!

As usual, it's been months since I wrote but I'll spare you the typical lame excuses. It was an incredibly mild winter in Philly and the bees barely stopped working all winter. They have built up quickly and some of my hives are booming already, looking like they usually do in summer. I went into the winter with 8 hives and I lost 2, both of which were weak and small at the end of last fall. I should have combined those two into one hive, which would have given them a better chance to survive the winter.

I am guessing it will be a busy year for swarming as hives build up quickly and take beekeepers by surprise (hopefully not my hives, but I wouldn't be shocked!). I had my first swarm call last week and I successfully captured and re-homed the bees. The bees swarmed from a colony living in the walls of a house in Conshohocken. I am scheduled to remove the colony from the house in early June. The swarm settled in the neighbor's yard on a peach tree. The day they swarmed was a gorgeous sunny day, but I didn't get there until the next day, which was cold and rainy. I think there is a good chance these girls would not have made it if I didn't grab them because the next two days were nasty.

The swarm was clustered on a two fairly thick branches, about 7 feet up in the tree, so I wouldn't be able to cut these branches off. I set up a ladder so I could get closer to the swarm. I would have to quickly shake/jar the branches to get the swarm to fall off.

When I shook the tree, about half of the bees went into the box (not shown in picture), a quarter of the bees ended up on the lawn and another quarter were still in the tree. At first I wasn't sure if the queen ended up in the box, but within 5 minutes or so, I saw bees fanning and spreading Nasonov pheromone at the entrance, which is a sure sign that the queen was in da' house. I moved the box to the ground to get the bees from the lawn. If you look at this crappy video, you can see a bunch of bees flying into the hole and also some bees marching on the grass towards the entrance as they pick up the scent of the Nasonov pheromone and reunite themselves with the colony.

                                    

Once most of the bees from the ground were in the hive, I moved the box back up to the ladder to get the bees that had reclustered on the tree. As a side note, I used the box from the Bushkill bee vac setup, which I find awesome for catching swarms.

I strapped the box on the ladder to secure it and I left it there for a few hours to give the bees a chance to rejoin their sisters and queen mama inside of the box. When I returned later in the afternoon, 99% of the bees had moved into the box, with just a small handful of stragglers holding out. I left them there, hoping that they would rejoin their parent colony back in the walls of the house. It was a successful and relatively easy swarm capture. I gave the homeowners, Danny and Abey, a small jar of honey and thanked them for helping me (and the bees!). I kept the bees in the box in my basement for two days until I had clearance to set them up at my newest apiary (story to come soon)...