Guilfordbeekeepers.org

The nuc that I hived not too long ago attempted to swarm a little after noon today. The bees formed two good sized clumps on a bush at the back of the yard. I used my swarm bucket to collect one and my small generator and bee vacuum to collect the other. I hived them separately, but it became clear pretty quickly that they were returning to the hive of origin. As I said in my original post about hiving this nuc, I had the queen above a queen excluder to keep her from putting brood in the deep super I hope to remove. She would have had to go out the upper entrance or be reduced in size enough to pass through the excluder to have left with the swarm.

The bees made a second escape attempt around 12:30pm today, March 22nd. Within 20 minutes of gathering about 25 feet high, they began returning to the hive. Wally suggested I split the hive, so I called Marc for help and warned him to be prepared to wear gloves. We found a short, fat queen in the top medium super. I put her in a queen clip and put her in a nuc with a couple of frames of brood and nurse bees and frames of honey and of pollen. We let her loose and shook more bees in this nuc before closing it up. We found the original mated queen further down and put her in another nuc with brood and food, and placed this nuc at the original hive location. I had to destroy a few queen cells to be able to place brood in this nuc--one of the rare times I would do that. We put bees in 3-10 frame medium supers with many capped queen cells, including one that was piping. Finally we made one more set up with 2-10 frame mediums, multiple capped queen cells, the queen excluder, and the deep box on above the excluder. All in all, 2 nucs and 2 hives from the one hive. I would have waited longer to do this if I could, but I can only hope that there are drones in the area so that queens can get mated. There were lots of drones in this hive, but not many in my 2nd strongest hive.

Tomorrow I will try and upload short videos of the beginning of the swarm and of the bees returning to the hive and post links to them here.

Great write up. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to seeing the videos soon.

Here is a brief look at bees coming out of a hive at the start of an attempt to swarm. I had a queen excluder on (for another reason) that prevented the queen from leaving, so these bees came back to the hive.

http://s844.photobucket.com/user/robert ... 3.mp4.html

And to think that was a questionable single hive in Jan. That is amazing. Just goes to show you what a hive can do.

Queen battles are taking place in the splits. I saw 2 bees carrying away a dead queen just a few minutes ago. One got very testy when I took the queen from her. That gives me a relatively high degree of confidence that the queen is from the splits of this "hot" hive.

The mystery continues. Marc and I went through the 3 splits, the club's package, and a couple of my other hives today. The queen had been released in the queen package, but I did not see her yesterday. We did not see any sign of her today. We also went through the nuc from the split where we put the original laying queen. We did not see her and there was no open brood. My strongest hive at the house was the same. I saw the marked queen earlier in the week when I took a frame of brood and nurse bees out to put in the observation hive. Today we did not see any sign of the marked queen and no open brood. There was a lot of capped brood.

I'm going to see if I can pull frames of open brood from some of my outyard hives tomorrow to put in these hives as diagnostic frames.

My use of the queen excluder between the deep (on top) and 2 mediums with queen cells below did not work as planned. We checked the deep and found eggs and a nice fat golden queen. We moved the deep to another bottom board and added another medium super to it with open frames and feed frames, an inner cover and a top. Below the queen excluder we found another queen on a honey frame. She appeared to be large enough to have been mated. We closed that hive and moved on. The next of the splits with 2 medium boxes had a laying queen in it. The last of the split hives, a nuc, has a queen that has not started laying.

I am seeing loads of nectar in my hives at the house. I'll need to keep an eye on all hives to make sure they do not become nectar/honey bound.