Swarms/Absconds 9/11/21, 9/12/21

[Jacobs]

This has been an active few days. Carl Huffman called me to get a swarm that possibly came out of one of his hives, but more likely was attracted to his apiary in my humble opinion. He didn't have equipment to put them in.

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We hived the bees, but they came out overnight Sunday and I wound up vacuuming them and carrying them home Monday. Sunday evening, this small abscond showed up at my house.

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I have the queen in a catcher clip in a nuc and will release her this afternoon. Yesterday, I tried to help a potential new beekeeper collect a small abscond on the ground at his Aunt's home. We got it hived, but they came back out and left. Finally, yesterday, I rode with Carl to Winston-Salem to see about bees in a water meter box at a friend's business property. The bees had been there briefly, but left after building a small amount of comb on the underside of the meter box lid.

Whew!

[Jacobs]

Nancy Adamson has the Carl Huffman bees, and I am waiting for a bit nicer weather to see what kind of job the queen of the small abscond is doing after combining those bees into a larger, queenless hive. I marked the queen before combining them and confirmed that she was still alive and well a few days after doing the newspaper combine. Bees had chewed through parts of the newspaper and there were clearly more bees around her than had been in the abscond when I first checked on the status of the combination.