Those Durn Little Bees

This spring has been full of adventure! We went into the winter with five hives, and came out with two. Considering I did not work them at all (something about bee-ing a wee, wee, wee bit pregnant), I figured that was pretty good.

We ordered 10 new packages of bees, to increase our stock for the spring honeyflow. They were supposed to arrive at the beginning of April. But in case you did not notice, the South received rain, and rain, and more rain, and high winds, then a bit of rain.... The long-anticipated arrival was pushed back not once, not twice, but three times!

In the meantime, one of my hives was about ready to swarm. We had so many bees in it, we split it into four new hives, allowing each to requeen. Unfortunately, we have had so much rain ourselves, two of the hives lost the queen when she went out on her mating flight in the middle of a rainstorm. There is a reason why bees aren't supposed to fly in the rain - raindrops are bigger than the bees are, and knock them right out of the sky! But her genetics told her to go on a mating flight, so fly she did.... So then we were up to three functioning hives.

We finally got the bees installed, and lost only one hive in the process. The queen had not been released yet, so we transferred her to one of our empty observation hives, along with a frame of brood from one of our established hives. They accepted her, giving us 12 functioning hives, plus one observation hive.

Then there are the hives that belong to the 12 year old. He is not allowed to keep hives on his property, due to housing association regulations. We allow him to keep them on our property, and he checks on them when he remembers. Being 12, he does not check on them as often as he should. The day he came over, we found it necessary to split that hive into three separate hives, allowing each one of those to requeen. That brings the apiary up to 15 hives, plus one observation hive.

Then the swarms started. For the life of me, I don't know where they are coming from (though maybe from the 12-year-old's hive - I don't check on those). They have not been nice, polite swarms, that hang out on a branch low enough for me to collect. No. The first swarm (lost when we installed the bees) flew away before we could prep a hive for them. The second and third swarms were about 60 feet up in the air, well beyond the reach of my equipment. The fourth swarm absconded from the observation hive, but were nice enough to land at face level so I could collect it. (My 3-year-old daughter loved playing with the low-lying bees on THAT one!) The fifth swarm landed about 20 feet up on the trunk of the tree, and we are attempting to coach them down as I write this. Their may be a sixth swarm already in the hive we are attempting to coax the fifth swarm into.

And this does not include the swarm we caught when we responded to a request to remove bees from a tree. (We are still looking for a tree stand so we can remove the remainder of the bees from the tree.)

We aren't out of empty hives yet, but we may soon be.

Anyhow, I need to go out and check on that potential new swarm, but I did want to provide an update here. Sunny days!