06-27-05

WHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a time we have had. I had a 2 day show this past weekend. Saturday was great not too hot and comfortable. Sunday it rained all day, did I mention I had an outside booth?

Since we had an early show this year we had to pull some supers with Wildflower honey earlier than usual. So father's day weekend I planned to paint some windows for the craft show and we would pull super's on Sunday. About 12:00 we had 4 swarms of bees. Swarms are never, ever a good thing. The old queen realizes that a new queen is going to hatch and she decided to leave the hive and take about 1/2 of the workers with her. Our job is to coax the queen and the bees out of the top of the tree and back into a hive. Our sophisticated equipment consist of a large coffee can duct taped to a long pine pole. My husband then shakes the bees into the can, hands the pole to me and I dump them put in front of a new hive. Now the bees want to go home so most of them will go into the hive, however if the queen is not in the bunch we have dumped we have to keep trying to get her out of the tree. If we get her into the hive then the bees will definitely go into the hive and start to work. However, you have to move them to a new bee yard or they try to go back into the old hive, creating quite a mess. SO we did these 4 times on Saturday. Sunday we started pulling supers, the temperature was about 90* degrees, multiply this by about 3 with a bee suit on and you will see that it was totally HOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We get 17 supers pulled from 3 different yards, got them home, stacked and ready to go. We decided to get cleaned up and go to town to eat and on the way back went by on of the yards and saw another swarm. So we went back home, changed back into sweaty bee clothes and went to the bee yard. My husband borrowed a 20 foot extension ladder, extended it all the way, climbed up the ladder to the top, tied it to the tree with a rope and proceeded to go another15 feet up into the Maple tree. After 2 + hours we finally got them and the queen into a hive and settled.

FAQ's

What is wrong with a swarm? When a queen leaves the hive and takes 1/2 the workers with her you no longer have enough bee's to gather honey and tend the brood. This puts you several weeks behind in honey production. You have to wait for new brood to hatch and field workers are cut way down.

Until next time,

Ya'll be sweet