Collecting a swarm

I've only been beekeeping for two years and never properly seen a swarm, let alone collected one. But like many beekeepers I've watched a lot of YouTube videos so I was pretty familiar with the process.

My neighbour had had a feral colony in a hole in the large oak tree in his garden for a number of months and we'd been looking at it and discussing it throughout March. It was getting quite active. He asked me whether I thought it could swarm. I said that I thought it was possible but I didn't really know how likely it was.

Then one day in the middle of April my son called me into the garden because my neighbour’s garden was absolutely full of bees. The air was black with bees flying all over the place. I'd never seen anything like it. We watched them for maybe ten minutes and gradually the number of bees in the air decreased. We could see that they were gathering on a tree in the adjoining garden. After about twenty minutes there were no bees in the air and the swarm had completely gathered onto a branch in the tree. 

So I had to bluff a bit to my neighbour and give the impression that I was an expert on collecting swarms! My son and I got our bee suits on and headed into the neighbour’s garden to assess the situation.

We had to do quite a lot of pruning around the tree to remove brambles. After about twenty minutes we had good access to the tree and I was able to hold the box underneath the swarm whilst my son gave the tree a sharp shake. I'm pleased to say that it all worked exactly as I'd seen in the YouTube videos and the bees dropped into the box. I was able to put it on the grass on a sheet and wait for the rest of the bees to join the swarm. 

I was amazed how good natured the bees were. There were a hell of a lot of bees flying around us when we collected it but there was absolutely no aggression. To be honest they weren't bothered about us at all and they were just interested in having a great time together. 

We left it for about four hours and when we came back to it all the bees were in the box and there were no bees on the tree or in the air. Thank you YouTube! 

Later in the evening we carried the box round into our garden and shook the bees into a poly nucleus box and gave them 6 frames of foundation and some food. Since then they have been moved into a full size hive and are developing into a nice strong and good natured colony.

Here are some photos of the collection day.

Apiary update - Spring 2020

Whilst the human world is in lockdown, the bee world has been very busy taking advantage of a warm and dry spring. This post is to bring you up to date with the activities of our apiary.

March – winter survival checks

Back in March we did some very short inspections to confirm how the bees had fared over the winter. We were very pleased to find that all five colonies had survived the winter OK.

You might think this unsurprising, given the mild winter we had. But in fact colonies can often die as a result of mild and damp winters. They have more tendency to go out flying during mild winters, which of course is a waste of energy as there is unlikely to be any food available.

But despite the winter all our colonies survived OK and given the warm spring they got started with early foraging in mid March.

April – starting inspections

Because of the warm spring we needed to get started with inspections at the start of April – just as the world plunged into the weirdness that we have now become used to. I was initially concerned about how we would maintain social distancing, but fortunately my son Matt is a trained beekeeper so we were able to undertake the inspections together. I was even provided with a key worker letter in case our travel was questioned by police. Travel to tend livestock is permissible.

Drone Laying Queen

All was not entirely well within the hives however. The first issue we encountered was a drone laying queen in hive 2. This is not uncommon after winter. The queen starts to lay again in spring, but she has run out of stored semen from when she mated as a young queen. Without the ability to fertilise her eggs, all offspring end up male and the colony is doomed.

The solution is to replace the queen as quickly as possible. One of our colonies was a strong but small colony in a nucleus box (the small one on the left). So the old queen was removed and the colony united (combined) with the nucleus colony. This worked well and they are now a strong colony with a good queen.

Hunt the queen

Our next challenge was hive 3. For two or three inspections we were unable to find the queen. There was no sign of brood in the brood boxes either. Very bad news. To confirm that the colony has no queen, you “lend” the colony a frame of eggs from another colony. If the colony has no queen they will quickly build queen cells from the eggs to allow them to make a replacement queen. This they did NOT do. Weird.

We only discovered two weeks ago that the queen was there alright. But she had somehow found her way into the “supers” above. These are supposed to be for honey storage, but because the queen was in there she laid eggs in there and they ended up full of brood! What a mess.

The solution was to shake all the bees off every super frame into the lower brood box, and hope that included the queen.

Luckily that worked fine, and the following week we found that she was now in the brood boxes and laying eggs fine. Now we just have to wait for all the brood in the supers to emerge and we can tidy up things and get them back to normal.

Swarm prevention

It is inevitable that in this lovely warm spring the bees will be making preparations to swarm. So far we have spotted the signs of swarm preparations in hives 1 and 4. So both of these hives have been “split” – a process where you take the queen and some frames of brood and stores into a new box. This makes her think that she has swarmed and crucially makes the original colony think she has gone so they stop their swarm preparations. The other side-effect is that you end up with more colonies. This is a double-edged sword, because it means more time doing inspections and requires more equipment.

Through June

So that is where we are at the end of May. June is still a prime month for swarming, so we’ll be watching carefully for that. And also hoping that there has been a good enough nectar flow to bring in at least some honey.