Swarm!

It’s that time of year again… Springtime, when nature starts to shake off the final grasp of winter, although here in Texas, winter keeps trying to claw its way back. Animals are coming out of hibernation, flowers are starting to bloom, and the bees are starting to buzz!

It is right now that bees are beginning to collect nectar and pollen, and more importantly, produce more bees. The queen is laying egg after egg and will continue to do so until the temperatures drop again – and I’ll be honest, she will even continue in the cold months, but at a much lower rate, after all the average lifespan of a honey bee is under a month. But what happens when there are too many bees for their home? Or maybe they just don’t like it their anymore, or maybe the queen doesn’t like it, but a good portion of the bees do like it?

Well, you get what we had here last week, which is the way… wait, which is a swarm. It started Friday, March 27, when Mary Bradshaw posted this on Facebook:

I started getting texts about my bees going crazy, so I pulled up the video and decided that I’d make the drive out there and see what was going on. By the time I got there, nothing was going on, my bees were chilling in their hive like they normally do, and I had nothing other than that video to go on. I had a couple of theories at this point but nothing hard to go on, and everything seemed fine, so I went back home, only to get more messages late that night and early the next morning.

There was a puddle of bees in Mary’s backyard!

SWARM! Some bees (maybe mine?) had taken a liking to Mary’s yard, at least while they searched for a new home, and we had just the place! So we grabbed everything and checked on our original hive, yep, still bees doing bee things in there, so this is not an absconded swarm. Bees can abscond for numerous reasons – predators, them not liking their home, lack of a viable queen, and if they had left my hive, with all of its honey, I could have just put them right back in there, and they most likely would have been fine.

But, since there were bees in there, that meant this was another hive, so we set about actually setting up the extra hive box that we had, stole some honey frames from the established hive – we left them enough to get through next winter still, this will just deplete what we are able to harvest, and set about scooping the bees into the new hive!

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Using a clean dustpan, some sugar water, and a bee brush, I scooped the bees up and dumped them into the new hive, closed it up, and left it until after dark, when I came back and gave them a very small opening to get in and out of. This allowed for some air circulation, as well as them to start establishing themselves – collecting pollen and bringing in nectar of their own!

And then we waited. I was pretty certain I got the queen, but I had not seen her actually, I was pretty busy trying not to get stung – collecting bees off of a leaf strewn lawn is not the easiest thing in the world, and I definitely agitated them some – I got stung five times, once through the fabric of my glove, and four times on the back of my calves through my pants! We received pictures here and there from Mary, but we wanted to give them a chance to feel comfortable in their new home, and start building! So, on Thursday, April 2, I went back and checked on the new hive, and the established one. In the meantime though, we cleaned out some old hive woodenware and painted them!

I filled one of them with frames that already have a wax foundation to give the new hive a leg up on starting to collect things – They still have to build the cells, but the framework is already there. The established hive was doing fine, had started rebuilding the honey frames we had taken, and the new hive was looking good too!

You can see a few little pieces of honeycomb they’ve started building. What you don’t see is that the frame at the top of the picture is completely built out already, and the next three were the ones that had honey in them!

Finally, I opened the hive all the way, set the new hive box on top, and walked away, happy that we were well on our way to establishing a second colony!

Thanks for reading and we look forward to hearing from you! Credit for all of the video and images goes to MJ Martin and Mary Bradshaw!