Guilfordbeekeepers.org

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.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. 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!

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.