about a month ago i came home from work early and happened
to notice some unusual bee activity across the road from our house. it quickly
became clear that part of our hive had swarmed, taking our queen with them.
when a hive swarms, it is essentially the bees splitting the hive into two,
usually due to a lack of space, high nectar flow, or pests. the swarming
process is fascinating and I highly recommend “honey bee democracy” by thomas seeley
if you want to learn all about it. in short, the colony decides they are going
to swarm about three weeks before they leave. this gives the workers time to
raise queens for the part of the colony that will be left behind. the workers
stop feeding the queen a few days before they swarm so she can slim down and
fly. she hasn’t flown a single day since her mating flight, which was over a
year ago in our case. the bees swarm, taking the queen with them and fly a
short distance to a temporary resting place. in our case, this was across the
street about 30 feet high in a redwood tree. unfortunately there was no safe
way for us to access the swarm and collect it. the swarm moves to a new place
once the scouts have agreed on the best place for building a new home (more on
that later). the baby queens that were being raised in the hive should emerge
two or three days after the swarm leaves. that new queen then kills the rest of
the queens that have yet to emerge (there can only be one queen, in most
cases), gets her wings ready, goes on her mating flight, hopefully makes it
back to the hive, and then gets busy laying eggs. that whole process takes
about ten days and is full of pitfalls that could result in no queen. but our
queen made it back!!! pete spotted her last week when we did our first
post-swarm hive inspection.
during the ten days when our hive is in a queen transition,
baby bees laid by our original queen are emerging but no new eggs are being
laid. at the same time, the worker bees that have been around for about six
weeks are starting to die off. the queen starts laying eggs, but those eggs
will not hatch into bees for three weeks. it takes another three weeks for
those bees to become foragers. if you are still with me, this means that by the
time the bees from our new queen become foragers, nearly eight weeks will have
passed and we will have only a fraction of our bees left in the hive. this makes
me really worried because a small hive can more easily be taken over by robbers
or pests and there are not many foragers left at this point gathering food for
the hive. i am pretty certain that we will have to feed the hive for a couple
of weeks while this transition plays out to ensure they survive.
incidentally, i found where the swarm set up shop. there is
a church about 100 yards from our house as the bee flies. i noticed a lot of
bee activity in the flowering bushes around the church a few days after the
swarm. at first I thought they must be our home bees, but the next day there
were even more of them so I followed the flight path and found what are most
likely our bees. they set up shop in a hole in a very old sycamore in the
church parking lot. we really want to go up there and check in on them, but
they have picked another difficult spot to access. smart girls. i hope they are
able to make it on their own! each bee took honey with her when they left so
hopefully they have a good store set up already.
new home for our bees that swarmed
we got to harvest the first bit of honey from our hive. it
was an unintentional harvest, but the bees had made a complete mess of one of
the frames (holes and tunnels). we removed the frame but wanted to give them
most of it back because they need all the food they can get right now. We carved
up the good part of the frame and attached it to a smaller frame and gave it
back to the bees. they promptly moved all the nectar down closer to the brood
nest and still have a bit of capped honey for later. the upper part of the
frame that we couldn’t fit into the new frame had capped honey on it so we pressed
some, left the rest capped, and are enjoying a bit of our bees’ handy work. it tastes pretty
delicious! fingers crossed this will just be the first of many harvests…
capped honey from the hive - no processing needed!
pete squeezing the honey out of the comb
our first honey harvest! (about four ounces)
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