aaaAAAAAARRRRRHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SWARMING!!!!!!

Intheswamp · April 04, 2012, 04:56:21 PM

Quote from: carlfaba10t on April 03, 2012, 01:03:29 PM
Well again i will say great pics and video, for a new bee you have about 10 more notches on your bee stick than i have.HA! Was wondering if you know what type honey bees you show in the pix on the cameo box, they look a lot like my bees in color and size. They say there is a thin line between bravery and stupidity, referring to working the bees without bee suit. I have done the same thing myself when the bees were really stirred up,no stings yet knock on wood.
Carl :

I'm glad you're enjoying the entertainment, Carl. :) As for protective gear the only thing that I've worn since I got bees back in December has been a long-sleeved white shirt and a veil. I do have a ventilated jacket that I've worn once...and I've considered a suit if I decide to get into doing cut outs. If I sense the bees are at all defensive I will be the first to grab a veil! ;)

The bees come from my mentor and a friend of his. They state that their bees have a lot of Caucasian in them. They do seem to be gentle bees and do appear to make a fair amount of propolis.

Ed

Intheswamp · April 04, 2012, 05:21:34 PM

Quote from: backyard warrior on April 03, 2012, 09:21:21 PM
You are making me laugh this is called experience. We have all been there not knowing how to keep bees it all comes with experience. I can tell you one thing you dont have nearly enuff boxes on those hives for the amount of bees. They def were crowded raised queen cells and when they capped them they swarmed. Its imperative that you give them undrawn frames in the brood nest at the start of a nectar flow in spring and also room in the top of the hive-- the honey supers. It is quite a rush and amazing to see the bees cast a swarm its truely awesome. I guess i should tell all of you when i first got started i hived a few packages. Well to make a long story short one of the packages had a virgin queen in it. When i put the caged queen in the hive all the bees flew up into a tree 30 ft up and im like what the heck is going on here the queen is down here?? It gets better. Well i have tree climbing gear right. So i suit up start scaling the tree and when i get to where the bees are they fly back down to the hive and there i am up 30 ft in the tree. Make a long story short i got poison from the episode and a lesson about the bees they are the boss. :evil: Chris

<chuckle> Well, I'm glad your enjoying it too, Chris. :-D I haven't enjoyed the bees forming but I'm enjoyed he experiences that I've encountered so far in regards to working with them. A paper I wrote years ago in college was entitled "Experience...the best teacher".

So with the number of bees you see the hives need more boxes? I've been scared to give them too much room for fear of SHB setting up camp...I have the beetles anyhow, but the bees seem to be handling them pretty good so far...and I hope they continue. I guess I'm just not sure what a good, uncrowded frame of bees looks like. I've still gotta figure out that tight rope of "crowded but not too crowded".

Thanks for giving me a hint about the bees being too many for the number of boxes. How many pounds of bees do you think there were in these swarms? I'm thinking possibly 6-7 pounds in the first swarm...just going by how heavy the frames seemed when I moved them from the camo deep box to the mediums.

Ed

Intheswamp · April 04, 2012, 05:25:28 PM

Quote from: CBEE on April 04, 2012, 11:32:02 AM
Yeah, They sure have a mind of their own :roll: Some Hives are going to swarm no matter what you do. At least you were there to catch them :-D Some swarms will stay where they land for a good amount of time but some of them will leave a few minutes after they ball up. I had a small hive swarm on me that just did not want to go beyond 2 medium supers no matter what I did.

I'm beginning to think they're smarter than me and they're just messing with me.<sigh> I've got a LOT of learning to do about bees. I'm hoping *maybe* Sunday evening I can go in an work on the mother hives some...formulate a plan to open them up a little bit. I caught one swarm on it's second trip out...but the other one I missed. :(

Ed

Intheswamp · April 04, 2012, 05:31:47 PM

Quote from: danno on April 04, 2012, 03:44:29 PM
I seldom loose a swarm if I move them to a new location. I have 4 yards so it not a problem. When I get lazy and keep them in the same yard they swarmed from, they quite often leave.

That's interesting about moving them to another site, danno. I wonder what makes them not want to stay in the same yard....gps over-ride or something? I thought that once they swarmed they give no indication that they ever had a home...that they're simply looking for "somewhere else". Could it be that their orientation prevents them from wanting to stay even 4 to 8 feet away from the original mother hive? But then, I hear folks talk about swarms issuing and going into an empty hive right beside the mother hive. ??? Man, I've got a lot to learn!!!! ...and one of those things is SWARM MANAGEMENT!!!! :shock:

Ed

Intheswamp · April 04, 2012, 07:17:36 PM

Here's a couple of mentions that I thought I'd make...

The three swarms that I've dealt with issued between about 10:30am and 11:30am here in south Alabama. Temperatures by that time were probably in the mid to upper 70's.

The swarm this morning also landed in the briars. I stepped it off and it was only probably 30-35 feet from the nearest hive and probably about 10 feet from where one of the swarms landed the day before yesterday.

After spotting the swarm this morning I looked into the hives that I put the swarms from Monday into and both of them only held a big handful of bees today. One of these small clusters had a petite looking queen with it. ??? I did not dig too deep into the other one (no veil and they seemed a little antsy) so I can't say whether there was a queen still in that hive or not.

I had five old drawn combs in a 5-frame nuc from a previous adventure. I took two of these and put one in the center of each of the medium boxes comprising the hive I'm trying to get today's swarm into. I'm hoping this will get them working on polishing cells and the queen to laying. We'll see...

This is a kinda grainy picture I made with my cell phone. When I was working with the swarm I spotted the queen in the circled area that I have circled...I haven't had time to check the video good to see if I can see her crawling around there. There is a briar stem that the weight of the bees is holding down....I picked it up and shook it over the entrance. I watched for about a minute and saw the pretty lady come out of the pile and scramble inside the hive. I guess I'll know when I get home whether they stayed.

Well, here's a video of the ladies and a few hen-pecked guys heading back into the hive (again).<sigh> This is before I shook the pile of bees with the queen in it....so she should be in the area marked in the picture above...holler if you see her! ;) Ed

Honey bees marching into hive...

backyard warrior · April 04, 2012, 09:24:59 PM

A little pointer for the rookies. If you have hives with open brood and you get a swarm. Take a frame of open brood and put it inside the hive before you put the swarm in the box you will be quite surprised how they readly accept the new location you give them, they dont want to leave the brood they will stay and feed it and accept the location. Try it sometime it works !!! Chris

Intheswamp · April 05, 2012, 01:24:21 AM

Ok, I *think* I got them. I got in late this afternoon and there was a small cloud of bees that looked like they were orienting on the entrance. Looked a little later and there were fewer bees flying. After church I got my red headlight and went to see what was going on...the full(?) moon helped, too. I had to move the little nuc with handful of bees in it to a different stand...hope they handle the move ok. I then closed up the swarm hive and carried it to a hive stand and set it down. I could hear bees inside but not a loud sound. Hopefully they're still in there. Tomorrow is supposed to be very stormy so we'll see how they ride it out.

An interesting note is that I believe the small handfuls of bees left over from the prior swarms seemed to have grown in number since this morning.

Ed

BlueBee · April 05, 2012, 03:30:27 AM

Swamp, this is getting better than CNN :)

Intheswamp · April 05, 2012, 09:04:41 AM

You think it's "getting" better than CNN??? IT *IS* BETTER!!!!

CHECK OUT THIS SHOT OF THE HIVES AFTER GETTING THE SWARM ON A STAND LAST NIGHT!!!!!!
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V Incredible, huh?!!! CNN just wishes they had this ability!!!!!

:lau:

CBEE · April 05, 2012, 10:29:33 AM

Swamp, If you ever do a cut out you WILL want to suit up or you may be running for your life and screaming for your mommy :shock:... DON'T ask me how I know this :-D

Intheswamp · April 05, 2012, 02:32:52 PM

Thanks for the advice, CBEE. I do tend to be on the conservative side. Right after swarming I did feel reasonably safe around the bees. But yesterday when I re-hived that swarm it had been a couple of days since they gorged out on honey from the mother hive. Figuring they might not have foraged much since then and that they might be a little more testy, I pulled my veil on to be safe. I try to remember that stings come from a defensive action from the bees so I do my best to move slow and smooth. If I'm going to start dismantling a colony's stucture I'm going to wear protection...until I get a LOT more experience. ;)

Ed

Intheswamp · April 15, 2012, 09:59:28 AM

Well.... I was going to stay at the shop after work Friday and do some painting on some supers and whatnot. But instead, I decided to go home and relax a little. :roll:

Getting home I walked down to the bees to see them getting ready to turn the sheets down and call it a day. They looked normal, a few bees buzzing around the entrance of the hives...a few late foragers returning...nothing odd.

For some reason I decided to check the "briar patch" out. Not 3' from where the 1st swarm had landed I found another large swarm (#4 for me if I count the swarm that absconded and I re-hived).

I figure this swarm had been there since probably the morning (the other swarms had issued between 10am and 11am). The sun was going down so I had to move fast...I didn't get a picture of the swarm on the ground by itself, but here is how I left it for the night after a LOT of bees had marched inside the two medium boxes (when it got dark they quit moving). BTW, this was a stubborn swarm...I didn't think it was going to go inside the boxes. Also, after Friday night I did wear my bee jacket being as I figured they'd been out for a day and might be getting edgy. There seemed to be more bees flying than there were with the earlier swarms and a few buzzed me but overall they were still very gentle...

The next morning the beard on front was a little larger. I managed to get some more bees to go in but they stopped going in and formed a thicker, larger beard on the front with a pile of them still in front of the porch. I reversed the boxes figuring the entrance or bottom box might be congested with bees that had already gone inside. I then brushed some of the lower bees down onto the porch. This didn't seem to help much...

I eventually took the cover off and shook the bees off of it into the top of the hive. I then used a little broom straw broom (that broom straw has been *mighty* handy!) to pick up gobs of bees off the front of the hive and drop them over into the top of the box onto the frames. I also brushed some more of the bees lower down onto the porch again. (The square piece on top was something I threw on top for a little shade...the ssb was on the ground and not much ventilation at that point.) The tide had began to turn...

Finally last night (Saturday) I sealed the entrance and moved it to it's stand in my row of hives...

This swarm is now residing in the double-medium stack in the middle of the row. I put two quart jars of 1:1 on top of the hive and told those ladies good night!!!

I had set up and leveled five hive stands when I laid the yard out. I started with three colonies and thought I might catch some feral swarms this spring/summer...figuring five colonies would be *plenty* for me to work with. I just didn't know what I had in store!!!!! Here it is only the middle of April and all hive stands are occupied and I haven't even seen a feral swarm yet!!! And, regardless of the swarming, it appears my two big hives are making honey...maybe not a bumper crop but if things work out, I'll get a little honey for my troubles. :)

I have some videos which I'll try to upload today or tomorrow... :)
Ed