Bee Day

Today was pretty much dedicated to the bees. For those of us who bought nucs through BioFuel Oasis, we had a free class today that had us going into a couple hives from those nucs. My friends Sophie and Rachel from down the street, whose hive I'm hosting, went to the class with me with the plan to inspect both our hives afterwards. While we were there Veronica texted me to let me know that the bees were swarming back at our place.This was the third time in three weeks that Rachel and Sophie's bees had swarmed and we knew it was time to go in there and find out what was going on. So we learned how to count varroa mites doing a sugar roll test and then left headed back to my place where we found a small swarm in the plum tree.

The first order of business was to catch the swarm. This was by far the most accessible swarm I've dealt with. It was at eye level in a tree in my own backyard. We grabbed a cardboard box and shook them into it. They seemed to stay there so we assumed that we had gotten the queen. The we just let them be to make sure that they stayed in the box and moved on to inspecting the hives.

We started with my hive because it was newer and less established. I had put on an additional super the week before and I wanted to see if they were starting to fill it. Everything looked good; there was brood in the nuc frames and may have been expanding outward. The upper super had some honey in it and everything was looking as it should. Then it was on to Rachel and Sophie's.

They had a deep super with two regular supers above and as soon as we removed the lid we could see that the top super was completely full of capped honey. It is so ready to harvest that it is going to be quite the bounty of honey. We removed the two top supers and started inspecting the lower "brood" super, which was super active as well with six of eight frames dedicated to brood and the outer two frames filled with honey. The next super up also had some brood but you could easily see where the brood sphere stopped and the honey started. And then the top super was all honey. To give them so extra room and to hopefully prevent more swarming, we added an extra super that I had since they needed it more than I did. Once we harvest I'll take it back and add it onto my hive.

Now back to the swarm, who seemed to be happily staying in the box. I called up a couple friends, Sarah and Yvette, a couple blocks away, who had an empty hive that they've been looking to fill. They wanted the swarm so I carried the box of bees over to their house and dumped them into their hive. When I got back to my house I noticed that there were still bees hanging from the same branch as before as if grouping around a queen. So I shook those into another box and let them be for a while. They hung out as well in the box so just to be sure I took those bees over as well and dumped them into the box. This was a few hours later and the original set of bees were still in the hive and working away so that's a good sign. Hopefully they'll stick around.