First swarm of the season hived

A day late though, they had already moved into the old hive in the barn. Saturday. Sunday I cut them out. This gives me a chance to clean the old comb & wax moth cocoons & webs out. I'll close it back up as there is it always seems to have bees. A few screws and it will be easy to uncover next time. I sure wish I'd seen them before they moved in, but then again, I needed to clean the feral barn hive up.

I added a queen excluder on the entrance & screened the inner cover vent hole to keep the queen in. I had a newly hived swarm leave last year. I'll see if this helps. It's just a piece cut off of a full excluder & set into grooves cut into the three piece frame.

The feral house hive has swarmed

It was a pretty good sized swarm & by the time I got my camera all but a few were inside already.

Look at all those fat little tails up in the air. 

As you may recall from a recent post, the hive had grown considerably.  I was mowing the lawn today and was under the largest apple tree  and I looked up. I was in the middle of a swarm. I was expecting it, but never saw them come out or settle anywhere, but now I bet they were in the tree all along. In any case, I turned the mower off & walked with the swarm towards the barn expecting them to ball up in one of the fruit trees. It seems they already had, and were headed to the old feral hive in the corner of the barn. Sure enough, they moved in.  This should be an easy cut out if I do it right away. I wish I had more time, I'm already way behind on everything.

Although I didn't see them come out of the house, the heat signature from the hive is now much smaller. Still a good size hive though, they may swarm again.

before

after

I wish they had gone into one of the empty hives I didn't get around to setting up. :-)

more bees

We cut this hive out about 4 weeks ago & I left a little comb thinking maybe another swarm would move in. After all, the horses that used to use this barn are long gone.  The owner said the hive had been there last year.

Lots of drones, lots of mites, but tons of really friendly bees.

Judging by the age of the brood, the new swarm moved in a couple of weeks later. Not as big or populated as the previous tenants, but no mites that I could see, and the same dark friendly bees and enough to fill a deep box. Unlike the previous hive which had very little honey stores, the blackberries are now in bloom and this hive had plenty of honey. Everything got sticky. 

  This is the next stall over. Another swarm moved in here about the same time as the other one.
The Bushkill bee vac
 sucks them right into a hive  The first hive filled three deeps, two of bees and foundation & one deep of brood, the other two just one and a western of comb each. It works really well. After you remove the vac assembly, you set the banded brood box on top, pull a divider out, and the nurse bees move up to the brood. A screen on top keeps them cool for the ride home.

 Learning from my mistakes, this time I added rubber bands to one side of the frames using small frame nails. It made it much easier and faster to add bands only to one side with the cut out comb laying in the frame and it was a lot easier on the brood as well. The new comb is pretty fragile. We got a box full of eggs, brood, pollen, and honey banded up. When I got them home, I reversed the boxes on a hive bottom & added a top

 Most of the bees in front have already been removed, there are plenty more between the next layers of comb..

By the time I worked my way up to the top, I still hadn't seen the queen. Then my wife saw her. She hid in the crack in the corner. We chased her from one side of the wall to the other back and forth  until I caught her.

                                      

 There was some interesting pollen here. At least I think it is pollen. It looks like mud. (edit: probably blackberry pollen)

The owner has another hive in the ceiling of a small storage shed. 

Our first Honey beecut out.

They were behind two sheets of plywood in an old unused horse stall with a John Deere backhoe in the way.

As cutouts go, I guess this was pretty easy. I'm not sure if I would want to do a hard one. It took a little over 5 hours total. 

Started late around 3pm, but it all worked out well.  Only a couple of bees flying when we left just before dark. We got most all of them.

Found the queen behind a comb in the upper section!! I left the upper piece of plywood on until the lower part was cleaned up.

You notice how few bees were on me. They were very tame.   I only smoked them a little at the start & vacuumed the guard bees first.

They are very small bees and there are a lot of them!

We got ten frames of brood banded, but they had very little honey put up but the blackberries will be blooming very soon. I'll give them something to get by on until then.

As usual, click on one for a larger slide show

Lots of drone brood