In my last post I talked about the surfeit of queen cells in hive #2, from two weekends ago. So, last weekend I went back to check on how things were progressing. Here's a hive-by-hive rundown:
- Hive #1 (Katherine): The colony are still building up slowly, but look healthy. There were a couple of frames in the hive that were now two years old, and really needed to be replaced. Both had capped and uncapped brood, and I didn't want to diminish the amount of brood too badly, so I decided to remove just one of them. Interestingly, after I'd shaken the bees off, I noticed two queen cells - one uncapped and one capped. I was a little lucky the bees hadn't swarmed. I was surprised that the colony are making queen cells already, since they don't really seem big enough yet, but the weather up to last weekend had been very pleasant so perhaps they were just taking advantage of the conditions. Anyway, I checked the rest of the frames thoroughly, didn't see any more queen cells, and burned the frame I'd removed.
- Nucleus (Dorothy): These bees had built up quickly, and had even started making comb in the space between the top of the frames and the roof. In fact, after I'd taken the roof off I realised that queen Dorothy was on the roof and not on the frames where she was supposed to be. I carefully picked her up by her wings and popped her back inside, and then removed the excess comb from the underside of the roof.
To slow things down a bit I took two frames of drawn comb out of the nuc and donated them to hive #1, replacing with new frames. - Hive #2 (no queen... or...?): I had a good look through - there were four more queen cells, which the bees had presumably decided to make just to keep me on my toes. I removed all but one, and then checked the big queen cell that I left last weekend. That one was open, so the queen must have emerged. It took me a while to find her (honestly, I nearly gave up) but I did spot her eventually. Reassured that the hive now had a queen, I removed the last queen cell and closed up. Happy days - all three colonies have a queen!
So, the position by the end of Sunday was three colonies, all with queens and with all queen cells removed. Great - that should have meant no risk of swarming for at least a week.
Fast forward to today, and this (it's worth having the sound turned up):
How did it happen? I have no idea. It wasn't great weather today - the temperature barely nudged above 12°C and it's been raining. About half an hour after that video was taken, we had hail. What on earth the bees were thinking, swarming in those conditions, I have no idea. Anyway, they've done it now. Unfortunately, they've settled about 15 feet up in a magnolia tree (they're still there as I write this) and there's no way I can get a ladder up to collect them, so they'll just have to stay there until tomorrow, when they'll presumably pick a permanent home and move in. I've left an empty nuc with some new frames in the apiary, a little distance away from the other hives, so with a little luck they might be tempted to move in there. Otherwise, they'll probably find a nice tree on Beechen Cliff and establish themselves as a feral colony.
One question comes to mind - which hive did they swarm from? The answer to that will have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a couple of great pictures of the swarm that were captured by my neighbour Mark:
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| The swarm |
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| Beekeeper fails to spot the blindingly obvious... |
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