Swarm_4_30_18-IMG_2454.JPG (47.35 KiB) Viewed 8623 times
I suspected the hive that issued this swarm as the source of the large swarm that went high in a tree last week. On the 27th, I was working the nuc beside this hive when I heard piping in this one. I have heard it every day since, including this morning. At about 2:00 pm, I saw what resembled orientation flights from this hive. The bees were not in the frenzy of a primary swarm. As the bees kept coming out, I saw that they were going higher and higher, and resembled a swarm, even though there was not as much noise as with most swarms. It was too breezy to put Swarm Commander in the air or on a particular location and have the bees come directly to it. I did put it on 1 or 2 locations and began tanging. The bees started heading in my direction generally, and I moved to under the dogwood where I had sprayed some Swarm Commander. After about 20 minutes of tanging, the bees started to settle on the branch I had sprayed. I shook them into my swarm bucket, but did not shake the queen in. She was walking around on the outside of the lid with a number of other bees. I got her in a queen catcher clip and hived the swarm with her inside the clip, inside the box.
I am seeing a pattern. Last year I had a hive swarm. I soon heard the piping of more than one queen and this went on for 3-4 days. That hive issued a second swarm. I suspected this one would do the same, and it did. My guess is that the workers prevented the queens from being able to enter into combat. For some reason, in this hive and the one last year, one swarm was just not enough. Has anyone else seen this?
Yes. Jess and I caught a swarm that was issuing from one of our hives. Jess caught a queen right away and we had put abot half of the swarm into a nuc box. We noticed that the cluster was not wanting to break up so we moved that box and started another box. Got the remaining bees into that box and moved it to a different location in the bee yard. Found a beautiful queen in that box one week later. One swarm with Two queens.