I was relaxing in my workshop while I was steam bending a set of chair legs and guess what I saw.
There was a cloud of bees over my apiary!
A healthy colony can produce a swarm any time when there are drones available for mating, which is April to October here. Most of the time, though, a colony will swarm once in May then spend the rest of the season building back up.
This swarm is very late in the season, but the queen must be a good one if she produced a colony vigorous enough to swarm during our dry season.
The swarm gathered on a small persimmon tree, so they were easy to catch. I just held my hat under the bee cluster and shook the tree to knock them loose then dumped them into a little hive box. I even got a glimpse of the queen as she scurried down between the frames.
Cheers, Professor Bromide
Check out @Homesteaderscoop for all kinds of sustainable handmade goods. I have some whole comb pressed honey up there, plus beeswax, and a maybe a little propolis.
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Did you get stung doing that? As much as I want to support bees, I can't shake my early childhood memories. One involved my brother and I discovering this thing on the ground (a fallen hive) and like any good little boy, he decided it should be stomped on!
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I only got stung twice on my hands. Swarms are pretty docile that way.
Your brother sounds like my kind of guy. No excitement in leaving things be. I recall a childhood game that involved taking turns poking a stick into a paper wasp nest until someone got stung.
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It certainly made for some excitement. I don't remember much of it now but the bees got up our sleeves and pant legs. They chased us to the house and I remember two things. First, my Mom with both of us by the hands running across a field to the neighbour's while he drove his car across the field to meet us, and secondly, sitting on Mom's knee at the doctors, after the stingers were out, watching her dab ointment on 5 places on one arm. I had 22 stings and he had 17. We were probably 5 and 4. Not my kind of excitement! lol
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Congratulations on catching the swarm! I hope they have enough honey to get through the winter. In our neck of the woods, the prevailing wisdom is that May swarms will do great, but August swarms will struggle. Do you feed your bees in the winter anyway?
I love the picture of the hat covered in bees!
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I have some other small colonies that I can combine them with. They stayed in that little box for about 30 minutes then moved out. Lucky for me they moved into the empty half of a duplex hive. The other side of the duplex has a weak colony in it that I can combine with this one.
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I didn't do any late fall feeding last year. Maybe I will try a late season sugar board to help out the light hives this year.
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How wonderful that you saw them swarm and were able to combine the hive into another box. Best of luck with your newbies.
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You've been visited by @porters from Homesteaders Co-op.
A community marketplace of ethical, handmade and sustainable products available for STEEM, SBD (and USD): https://homesteaderscoop.com follow: @homesteaderscoop
Smooth move! I'm glad your bees seem to be doing well and multiplying - to keep on producing all those wonderful products you have in your store at Homesteaders Coop! ---
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Thank you so much for being an awesome Partiko user! We have just given you a free upvote!
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Hi @professorbromide!
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