I decided it would be a good idea to inspect the hive which the swarms came out of; so I took the one hive apart and cut out dozens of capped cells. I found my one ugly frame and decided to replace it with a new frame; so I set the other frame out away from the hives to let the bees clean it up. It alone had 5 queen cells on it. As I was inspecting the boxes, I noticed that there was no young larvae on any frame; meaning that the queen had stopped laying a while ago. The queen stops laying when she is ready to swarm and the bees make her essentially lose weight so that she is ready to fly away when the time is right. Because there was no laying queen in the hive, I decided to leave two queen cells in one of the hives. The plan was to combine back my one caught swarm on top of one of the hives using a newspaper combine.
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| Queen emerging from queen cell! |
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| Queen cleaning herself (see legs wrapped around her head) |
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| A Queen meeting one of her servants |
The frame that I removed was full of queen cells and I had the opportunity to watch and take pictures of a queen emerging. I then took many pictures of the queen crawling on my hands. The queens were emerging within minutes of eachother. It was incredible. I ended up leaving these queens to die out in the grass. Yes, very harsh thing to do but I am sure glad that I acted when I did because if not the hive may have thrown even more swarms!
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| Capped honey frame! |
I decided that harvesting honey now would probably be my best option to get more frames for even more honey gathering. My wifes' uncle was kind enough to offer to extract my honey for me. I am looking forward to see what the honey tastes like.
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