Swarm Mayhem! Part 1 of 2

Sunday morning I went to visit my hives (in my backyard) and thought that it looked like a lot of commotion was going on. I then realized that my hive was swarming out. So I ran into the house and grabbed my video camera and took a video. I will have to figure out a way to post it on the internet; which will probably require getting a youtube account. More to follow on that front...

In the meanwhile, here are two swarms that I attempted to capture.

Largest swarm located 8 ft off the ground and around trunk.

Smaller swarm located 6 feet off the ground and dangling on a branch!

The large swarm obviously was the more attractive swarm to catch but it was right against the trunk of the tree and up 8 feet. I shook the swarm into a box half a dozen times but I never caught the queen. They kept flying out the the box and back to the tree. The weather was also incredible, with the temperature at 30C and with the humidity it felt closer to 40C. After spending an hour or more trying to get the swarm hived, I turned my attention to other things.

I did not have a problem to drop the second (smaller swarm) into a nuc box. It took two tries but then I set the box on a step ladder and the bees accepted it. I must have captured the queen on the second attempt.

I decided to inspect the hives which had swarmed. I noticed that my honey boxes were right full. Due to procrastination I am a bit low on frames; so I decided that it would be a good time to do an extraction session.

Lots of honey. Look how thick that frame is!

The queen excluder ironically had queen cells all over it! How did the queen lay in them?

Multiple queen cells located on queen excluder (between honey box and rest of hive)

When inspecting the hive I saw that a drone bee had a varroa mite on its back. This is not good news. It is definitely believable that the mite levels in the hive is very high, but it always bothers me to see mites on the bees. I will have to treat when the honey season is over.

Mite on a drone bee. Mite levels must be high!

While doing the inspection I noticed that there was no young brood in both of my hives. This is because the queen has swarmed out but it may cause a distruption in the mites' reproductive cycle as well. Time will tell.

To be continued!