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I released the queen yesterday and the bees took off again. They just didn't go far enough. They went to my fig bush and I was able to get the queen back in a clip. I may add a frame of open brood, or I may just instruct them to go high enough or far enough that I cannot retrieve them.

My neighbor was harvesting figs around 7:00pm on 7/6 and spotted a softball sized swarm in one of his fig bushes. I shook them into my swarm bucket, located the queen and got her in a catcher clip. I put them in a nuc with a very small amount of 1:1 in an inner cover cut to take regular mouth jars. ...

Two days ago was the first day that the bees emptied the nectarometer in less than a day. They are either waiting for me or following me out in the morning as I bring the day's pint of honey water.

Both hives appear to be healthy and thriving-if we can avoid massive rainfall events. The hive that got clobbered has 2 queens. I saw a nice, new unmarked queen yesterday, so I caught her and marked her green. I continued examining frames and about 4 frames over saw the original queen with her red m...

I don't feed automatically. If I want to make sure that a queen has what she needs to keep laying and not shut down, I'll feed 1:1 steadily, but not necessarily heavily. If a hive is very light after taking honey, I'll feed heavily. I'll add feed closer to dark these days to limit the smell of open ...

My bees are continuing to forage despite hot and dry conditions. The deep nuc with medium frames even managed to add a little comb under a medium frame in the last week. I have noticed a lot more clover in neighborhood yards this year. I wonder if this additional dearth time nectar source is really ...

My bees' behavior has changed from yesterday--they are now checking out anything with the smell of honey. I set up a nuc 11 days ago to try and get the daughter of a queen I like. Bees were leaving it alone until this morning. Now it is being robbed out. All queenright nucs are calm. If you are seei...

I was surprised by the arrival of a decent swarm to one of my bait hives around 2:30pm. I had put a queenless abscond in that box about 2 weeks ago and was letting that small group of bees play out. I thought the activity of the last couple of days was the abscond, but apparently it was scout bees f...

Formic Pro can take out queens-especially older queens or queens that are weakened for some other reason. I would give them a few more days to settle in after completing the treatment and check for queen status. The Formic Pro label does instruct to check queen status, I think, 4 weeks after ending ...

I still have some kind of modest flow going on at the house. The bees are going out for nectar at a steady pace and are showing only a modest interest in my nectarometer and in 2 supers of wet frames I put out 2 days ago. My harvest at home is down this year, but not as bad as I thought it would be....

There is still a bit of a flow going on at my house so that bees have shown some interest in wet frames, but have not gone crazy over them. They will clean them out when there is a dearth, but it may trigger robbing. One option may be to put them out within an hour or so of sundown. If it triggers r...

The long hive swarmed itself to death.

Give it a week, perhaps 10 days. You want the bees to reorient to the new location before moving them back.

I harvested at Brown Summit yesterday. The bees were very interested in any honey that dripped from damaged cells. Having hives open to take honey did not trigger probing or robbing. To me, that triggers the transition from flow to dearth.

I'll have a better idea about the flow later this week after checking some hives. This year has been different at the house. The holly type plants bloomed early and for the first time in years, were not damaged by late freezes. One look at the berry load on these plants confirms the honey bee activi...

I saw my first European Hornet of the season at the house this morning. I hope I get a shot at this queen so that I can keep a larger colony of hunters from developing.

The queen is laying, so this morning, I caught her and marked her green. Later today, I'm taking a swarm nuc with queen to another beekeeper. My plan is to let the remaining bees in that swarm experience queenlessness from this morning until early evening and then newspaper combine the strange swarm...

As good a guess as any. She is walking around on the frame and an occasional forager is coming back with pollen, so I may wind up with a really small colony to play with.