Another Swarm

A bee mitten

I am bee-sitting for another beek who recently divided a hive. The half I'm caring for had a few queen cells in it. Today the first virgin queen took off with an entourage to find a new home. While the swarm swirled around deciding on a good spot to temporarily cluster, I gathered my supplies. As my bees did last year, they clustered on the nearby old apple tree, fortunately within my reach from a ladder.

I tickled the first mass onto my gloved hand, and was quite tickled to have a bee mitten. I deposited them into a waiting hive box, and climbed up to gather more. Some bees were still sitting in the dust pan, which I had brought up with me the first time. There in the pan, I saw the queen, and hurried down the ladder before she could decide to fly off again. I had success, and the bees settled quite easily into the box. I retrieved some more bees from the cluster, but others seemed determined to stick around. So I went inside to make lunch, which I brought out for a swarm picnic. By this time, the bees that had remained on the limb were now reassembling at the hive.

Karin showed up about this time, and I coaxed her over to see the happenings. She's still rather bee-shy, but enjoyed watching the bees fan and gather.


View the full-sized images here.
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My own bees are doing fairly well, though there have been case each of regicide and accidental death.

The wee swarm queen turned out to be a dud. What few capped brood that developed were mostly drones. Last Monday, I found the queen and squished her. It is a bit challenging to willfully kill a queen, but I knew it was the best for the hive.

Then I found and caged Freyja. She was much easier to catch than her pretender daughter was, and pretty much marched into her cage. After about an hour, to let the old queen pheromones fade a bit, I placed her into the wee swarm hive. On Saturday, I went out to release her, and found her dead in the stem of the cage. Apparently she had crawled in and couldn't back out.


The queen cage, opened.

Next time, I shall not wait to put in the marshmallow plug. I will place it at the base of the stem, to keep a queen from crawling into the corked Tunnel of Death. Then, after the cork is removed, and the workers eat through the marshmallow plug, the queen can safely exit her confinement. It was a hard lesson, but it would have been harder if one of my better-performing queens had died instead.

So now this wee swarm hive has joined Ivanova's rather small queendom. Now I'm down to only five hives.