Orientation Day?

[Paynesgrey]

It's been 6 weeks since we installed the packages.
Everything was normal today until about 2 pm one of our smaller hives, Alpha, suddenly had many bees flying around it, landing on it, running up the front in lines and then taking back off and flying back around the hive, acting like they could not get back the entrace.

We thought, uh oh, robbing again....(We learned a lot over the last few weeks from a split that was too weak from the strongest hive, including how fast hive beetles can destroy a weak hive. It was a "learning experience.")

We watched carefully, and there was no fighting going on. All the bees coming out from Alpha were fluffy and clean, not dark and sneaky heavy. The bees coming from Alpha were not returning to any of the other hives, just flying around. The bees from the other hives were zooming up & out to forage, and back down & in, ignoring Alpha. After about 20 minutes, everything returned to normal.

Does this sound like new bees orientating? Or more learning on the way  :-\

We haven't gone in for the weekly check yet, will in a couple of minutes.

[sarafina]

orientation flights - usually in the afternoons and they are flying in circles.  Very cool to watch!

[Jim134]

     Bees  fluffy and clean and they are flying in circles around the hive at about 11:00 AM to about 2:00PM sound like new bees orientating to me





              BEE HAPPY Jim 134  :)

[Paynesgrey]

Thanks for the reassurance :) It really was really cool to watch. We had another hive do the same later in the afternoon, shortly before the time they start shutting down for sunset.

Everything looked good (as far as we know) when we checked, except we are taking several supercedance cells out of almost all the hives, even the 2 that are laying wall to wall pattern. They are all 2 deeps of brood now, no supers on top yet. We pulled up center 3 or 4 frames of brown capped/soon to emerge brood on the ones that were full/almost full on the bottom, and traded them for the drawn out but not yet laid frames from above them. The other queens were already laying in the newly drawn out areas of the top brood deep. We took the last of the syrup jars off.

The strongest hive had another swarm cell which we took out this time. Now now have nuc boxes, but are just going to let the hives we have build up, rather than try another split:). We saw lots of new bees emerging in the lower broods. It was hard not to want to stop and watch them chew out, but I think I'll have to just watch a video on that :)