Upon inspection, I found no eggs anywhere in the hive and several queen cells. *My conclusion was that this hive had swarmed. A few days later, I watched as this hive swarmed into my neighbors tree.
I caught this swarm with my Owens bucket vac. The fanning behavior of these bees was remarkable. The remaining cluster flew down to settle on my vac containing the queen. I hived the swarm with several frames of drawn comb, frames of honey and pollen to let the queen and the rest get started fast.
My questions:
Why was my original conclusion wrong? (Or WAS I wrong?)
Would the bees fan so vigorously for a Virgin queen?
NOTE: This was by far the largest swarm I have ever captured. I could not believe the numbers of bees. It did not reflect what I had observed in this colony only days before.
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Sounds like your initial observations where mostly right - but that was at the time of the preswarm stages. The queen will stop laying 2 to 5 days beforehand so she can lose weight and be flight ready. She will hang around to leave a day before the capped cells are due to emerge. So when you looked and saw no eggs, she was actually still there making all the preflight checks.
The size of the swarm described and the fanning indicates it was most likely the primary swarm. The main swarm. With the original mother queen in it. Happy you caught them.
The thing to do now is go back to the source hive and cull all the cells/virgins down to the two best ones and let them run with that. Bring a handful of queen cages with you as you may be presented with multiple virgins running around, or popping out of cells, when you go into the hive.
Hope that helps!
This is VERY useful. And very clear. Thank you! It answers questions that I have had for some time but became quite acute because of my described experience. And apologies for the delayed reply.
Question: Why would I want to cage the virgins and what would I do with the caged virgins to care for them?
Thanks, again.
Well they won't kill each other.
And if one doesn't come back mated, you can try again. It's best to let them mate right away from a little mating nuc. So their reproductive parts are in best working order.
There's some info here about Oxalic acid making drones sterile, which we were presented with when a fellow beek and I were having trouble with queens this spring. He's had trouble getting new queens, and I've had several "perpetually requeening" hives.
Update:
Looked inside the boxes I put that swarm in and the bees were gone, except for a bunch on a frame of honey. (I had previously put on an entrance guard on this swarm to prevent the queen from leaving.) Looked across at the mother hive they came from and it was jam packed with bees hanging down from the bottom board.
Conclusion: The queen didn?t survive the trip into the vacuum and died. No queen and the rest went back home.
I split the hive and divided the resources up as equally as I could. Queen cells in each split. Wait and see.