Bummer Swarm Remnants

Late last week, there was a swarm of bees hanging from a tree outside the building in downtown Des Moines where I work. Someone had noticed it in the evening and posted about it on Facebook - word got back to Animal Control and they were out there the next morning to take care of it. I didn't see it, but the general process is that they sweep the bees into a big box, making sure the queen is among them, and take them away somewhere where they can be relocated in a new hive stack, which they'll readily adopt. While they're hanging off the tree in a swarm, they are generally quite docile, as there is no home or brood to protect.

Of course, not ALL the bees go into the box, because a bunch are flying around ... so now, a week later, there is still a couple hundred homeless bees hanging around on that branch, likely living out their remaining days, which is, per the title, kind of a bummer.

These worker bees were part of a swarm. Their queen, and most of the bees from their former hive, had been corralled and relocated to a more suitable location.

Lacking a queen or hive, these bees have no mission or focus, and no way to start a new hive. A hard future for an orderly honey bee.

Long Live the Queen!

When I need to repopulate a hive in the spring, I prefer to use a nucleus hive (aka 'nuc' - pronounced like nuke, rhymes with duke - I hate it when people rhyme it with luck). Hopefully our hives will overwinter this coming year (that's the goal) and there will be no need to pronounce nuc in any event. Anyway, THIS year, we couldn't get nucs, so we had to go with package bees - we never had to do this before last year, so I'm still no expert at doing so.

Last year, it was cool and misty and the bees were lethargic and I was able to get the queen cage attached to a frame, pull the cork on the end of the little cage so she could get out, put the frame in place, and dump the rest of the package of bees on top of the top boards, with no incident.

This year, it was mid- to upper-60s, warm enough that these packaged bees were a bit feisty. So I had to work quick to get the bees dumped in on top of the actively moving queen - the second hive, I saw her already run out of the queen cage and climbed to the top bars before I was ready and I hastily dumped her worshippers right on top of her ... and I was confident that I'd done so successfully and she was in the hive and all was hunky dory.

But upon going to check on them later, the first hive was very active and the second had many fewer bees and didn't look like they were producing anything but maybe some pollen and nectar stores - no brood. In fact, to me, the lack of brood was evidence that there was no queen and I imagined that either I must NOT have been able to keep her in the hive that first day, OR, she took off with half the bees in the hive (technically '[swarmed', though I've never heard of that before they even get situated).

Normally if a hive goes queenless, there should at least be some eggs/brood in the hive (only the queen can lay fertilized eggs). If eggs exist, worker bees have the ability to make a queen out of them, provided the eggs are less than 3 days old. But in THIS case, there were no eggs in evidence, so the workers had nothing to work with. From that perspective, the only solution was to get a new queen in there as soon as possible. Knowing I had to leave town the next day for 5 days, I couldn't order a queen right away and risk her arriving while I was away. So I waited to order her when I got back with the idea that I could still salvage that hive upon my return.

I ran out today to put some food on them, to help them as much as possible ... and discovered that not only was the queen in the hive, but we have developing larvae as well as capped brood!

First I saw the capped brood

Then I saw larvae - look closely inside the cells at the curved shape of the baby bees 

So I scanned the frame and found the queen. Normally I don't really look for her since I hate to have the hive open for no productive purpose. If there's brood and eggs, there's a queen, so no reason to look for her. Telltale signs - she's obviously bigger and this one has a darker back ... but drones are also bigger - but here you'll notice all the worker bees surrounding her in a circle as attendants. That's an obvious telltale sign. She'll never have privacy again! 

So why did it look like that hive was queenless? Indeed, it bugged Jen and I in one small corner of our minds while on vacation when we should have been 100% enjoying the scenic vistas of Yosemite!

My only thought is that indeed a bunch of those bees did scram before setting up shop. Perhaps they didn't all accept that queen (the queen is introduced to the hive when they get packaged - in theory, by the time they arrive to the beekeeper, they should all have accepted her and her scent). So when they got dumped in the new hive, instead of putting up shop and getting to work, they took off, leaving a lot of maintenance work to the remainder. They need to clean up last year's un-maintained hive from last year, start building comb, and make it ready for the queen to lay eggs. Being fewer in number than the other hive, they took longer to make it ready and she got a late start.

Before I left, I put as much sugar water as I could in that hive's feeder to help them along as much as possible. I'm optimistic now that hive is going to be just fine.

Hey, we have a Blog!!

It's ugly (I think I thought it was funny) and it's outdated, but no reason to think it can't be resurrected and maybe given a facelift.