Honey Bee Sanctuary - NOT!

[ewok126]

If you can catch a swarm it is way better than purchasing a nuk. Here is why, A wild swarm vs a colony from some place else is that the local swam has built up a better immunity to the sicknesses that are in your local area. They will be stronger that one that comes from out of town so to speak. Also when purchasing a nuk you just never know what other problems might be coming with that colony. That is why if you must buy a colony or even wax foundation make sure it comes from a reputable source. Last and this is a super great resource. If you start a colony make sure to register it with your state bee association. First off it is federal law, second, they offer a great resource to where if you should run into a problem you can not identify just call them and they will send a master inspector out to look at your hive and tell you what the issue is and how to deal with it. Oh and best part ITS FREE lol. Also join a local honeybee club.

Tips for a new honey bee keeper. Do not wear dark colors lmaooo, Do not walk up to the hive at night with a flashlight lmaoooo. If you do have to look at night give the flashlight to an unsuspecting person. That is always worth the side stitches you will get from laughter lmaooo. Last, From my experience carry a knife of some sort for when or if you get stung. This is for two reasons one, If you should get stung and the bee is still attached to you you can scrape the stinger from the base where it is attached to you and possibly save the bee. (once they sting if they do pull out their stinger from their bodies they die.) Also, if they should detach their stinger people have a tendency to pinch the stinger with their fingers and pull it out. This is a mistake. What happens is when a person does this they pinch the poison sack and push all the venom into their body. If you scrape off the stinger from the base you do not push in all of the venom making the sting nowhere near as frustrating as it will be if you do push in all of the venom. Oh and break the habit of swatting at the bees. This is a human instinct when we panic. Don't panic stay calm and never swat. Have fun with them and learn all you can. Me personally I loved learning about the social aspect with in the colony. I now kind of view it like the social aspect within a church.

I have a sign near my hive that reads " I am a professional beekeeper. If you see me running, try to keep up!" I have had more fun with that sign than you could imagine. My neighbors wife came out one day while I was working with the hive. She seen the sign and kind of chuckled. Keep in mind she knew nothing of honeybees and was very timid. She kept getting closer and closer. As I closed the lid on my hive I took off running like I had a swarm on me or something. Of course I did not but she didn't even bother to see if there was a swarm. She took off swatting and flinging like she was in a swarm. There was not a single bee in the air or near her. I was laughing so dang hard and her husband was on the ground laughing so hard he couldn't stand up. Now granted I did have to run once she realized cause that woman was going to beat the piss out of me. We still laugh our asses off over that one to this day. Lucky for me she has a great sense of humor.

 

[ewok126]

some people who run the Langstroth hives for weight purposes Including myself use 8 frame mediums. A little shorter than the deeps and obviously narrower than a 10 frame.
I don't have any problem with picking up heavy items. I are construction worker.lol It's for already having the small equipment when I don't have a strong back any more from picking up to much and for the wife to be able to help today.

That got long winded.

I run the horizontal Langstroth Hive. I went with this due to my storke. I can not lift but a few pounds. No boxes to lift at all just the frames to take out and put in. Mine holds 30 deep frames per hive. My lid is hinged on the hive so I do not have to lift it off. I just flip it open. It is working great for me. PS: This is not my hive just a photo to show an example of my hive.

 

[NewBoots]

Ya, I did that two weeks ago. But it was time for a mite check and a comb check and I was already a week late. So... in I went. I did it really quickly though. I felt bad, but now I'll leave them alone for a bit. I'm done gathering honey for the year. It's time for them (in the TopBar) to start finalizing for Winter.

Now imagine that swarm a couple of weeks ago we captured. OMG THAT WAS INSANE, those were some angry bees.

I still haven't told that story in here. I should. It's quite the visual.

Pleasepleaseplease tell the story!

 

[WthrLady]

OH I FORGOT. OK I'm going to wash a long outside day off, and I'll start typing it up!

 

[WthrLady]

OK, now where to begin? It's long, so grab a drink and kick back.......

Every Friday morning from the end of April until mid October, I head to a neighbor's house 8 miles down in the valley (yes, here 8 miles is a neighbor. There are fewer than 8 houses between me and her.) to help her pick and strip flowers from her gigantic flower beds. They run 100 feet long and about 30 feet wide. She grows all types of flowers which she bundles all Friday afternoon, and sells in the city on Saturday morning at the huge farmer's market.

This Friday morning started like any other Friday morning. I got up. I threw on my grubby barn clothes, tossed my gloves and snips in the truck, took care of my morning ranch chores, and then pointed the truck downhill towards Beck's place. By now the sun has been up for an hour, long enough to burn off enough of the morning fog and dew, but not long enough to heat up the air around, or start the wind to blowing. None of that mattered on this Friday, at an hour past sunrise it was already 80 degrees, and the dew point was a hazy 76 degrees. We were surrounded by cornfield, and there wasn't a hint of wind to keep the sweat rolling down our faces.

We trudged up and down the rows, snipping prime blooms with long stems, stripping them, and placing them gently into a 5 gallon bucket. Snipping off duds, and tossing them into another bucket. When that bucket was full, we'd toss it over the fence to the awaiting goats, who acted like it was a pile of ice cream and cake all mixed into one, and nothing like the pile of ice cream and cake they had received just 5 minutes prior. Their munching, mumbling, and burping more than once made us giggle while we grazed through the flowers like picky cows looking for the best nibbles.

We passed the time chatting about just about everything, from kids, to business, housekeeping, part-time jobs, garage sales, thing to plant next year, crazy farm animals, and of course, bees. Becks has a few normal hives, because that's what popular here. It's what you see sitting the fields, hidden in hedge-rows, and sleeping lazily under the gentle shade of fruit trees. It's what sold at the farm stores. It's what every beekeeping club in the area uses. When you sign up for beekeeping classes through the local University or Extension, that what they teach. I'm trying to learn about them, the Langstroth, the Warre. But I use a Top Bar, and the Langstroth, the Warre are like trying to understand a foreign language. They work completely different, are set up differently, and run differently. The only thing that isn't different is the bees themselves.

Bees are bees the world over. Their social structure, their behavior and habits, and when they do what they do is all the same. It's not until humans intervene that thing go wack-a-doo. We seem to want to make them do things on our schedule with our goals (usually honey production) in mind. If we let them do what they want to do when they know when to do it, and just go along for the ride......well, that's my method of keeping anyway.

I digress. On this particular morning, our conversation, like I said, migrated towards beekeeping, or in this case, a problem with keeping. Becks has three hives on her property, and one was causing her problems. It was under producing last year, but her colony was strong, or at least appeared so. This Spring, things seemed to be on the upswing, despite winter lasting a full two months longer than normal, being wetter and colder than normal, and the absolute lack of pollen when the bees were at their hungriest. Every keeper in the state had to add feed to the hives and still many had a loss of 75%. Millions of bees died in the mid-west this winter.

Then it came. Spring. That hive was still doing well. The colony looked fine, until it didn't. And this is where our conversation now turned as we swatted at mosquitoes over our multicolored targets. She was down to about 500 bees in the dud hive. We looked for the queen. Nope. We looked for swarm cells. Nope. We did a might check. Nope. We looked for a heap of dead bees, fully ready to start drawing little chalk outlines at the crime scene, like we had just had to do at another one of her hives that simply died over the winter. Nope. There was no queen, but the workers and drones were trying to fill the void and lay eggs. We thought there was a virgin queen. She ended up replacing the queen, but the queen didn't stay. What to do, what to do.

We finished our flower picking for the morning just as a neighbor came walking over to order a bouquet for a new born grand-baby. I bid my farewells and gave my congratulations and plopped my soggy, buggy self back into my truck and pointed her uphill. When I got out of the shower I heard my phone chirping. A quick look told me it was Becks. What did I forget?

It was a photo. A photo snapped right after I left. I couldn't tell quite what it was, so I asked. She took a better photo and hit send. It showed a swarm. "OK. so where is that?" I typed back. Her reply, right over where we were standing when you left. The chattering of three hens had somehow managed to drown out the buzzing of thousands of bees (or they hadn't woken up yet).

I asked her how large it was, having flashbacks to last year......

She called and told me that her husband spotted a swarm 20 feet up in the maple tree. She was at work and they, her husband and brother, didn't want to let it get away. Lets just say it involved a chainsaw, a tall tree, a very tall ladder, the bed of a pick-up truck, and two men - sans beekeeping suits. The swarm was captured and remains productive, but let's just say that story was amusing. Rumor has it there is a video out there somewhere.

About then the phone chirped again with one word....MASSIVE.

OK, by definition Becks a swarm is a mass. "how big is massive?" As I glanced at the weather panel on my desk, 93 degrees, dew point of 75. Blech.

"It's up at least 20 feet and are on a branch and spread out about 6 feet long along the branch, and the center of the mass is huge."

"It's too hot now, so I'm going to set out a box and see if they'll go in."

Relieved at not having to crawl into a suit in that weather, I went about my day.

I made dinner and told DH that I as going to go down to Becks to help capture a swarm. It's and hour and a half to sunset. It's 97 degrees, with a dewpoint of 77 degrees and no wind. I load my bee equipment into the truck and point it downhill again. Pulling into Becks' driveway I'm greeted with quite the sight. Becks is in the yard with her full suit on. Her future sister-in-law in in flipflops, pants, and a bee jacket and hood. Her husband is in the yard with a video camera, the kids are far away from the fray sitting on the picnic table (kids have an instinct about danger), and her brother is precariously standing in the tree, one foot on THE branch, the other foot on another, while pulling a chainsaw up into the tree by a rope. Near the tree is a ladder. Perched on top of that is a 6 foot long, 10 inch deep, 3 foot wide box propped open like a corrugated clam, reeking of lemon grass oil.

I looked up at the tree while tucking my bee-suit legs into my bright yellow chicken Sloggers. Holy crap, it was MASSIVE. This wasn't a swarm that escaped a keeper. This wasn't a hive that split looking for a new home or a better school district. This wasn't a swarm that left due to disease or mites. This was a natural swarm that left either due to hive destruction, or removal. I'm thinking a giant log. We don't have many trees around, except down by the creek, where the ancient cottonwoods and oaks are allowed to grow to old age until they die and crumble or succumb to the eroding banks of the wandering creek. Becks, lives by the creek. Becks was right. The swarm was massive. It was 6 feet long and at it's widest was probably 18 inches across. The branch they were on was probably about 6-8 inches wide. The brother in the tree looked both brave and apprehensive at the same time when he looked at me and asked me how he should cut this so it didn't swing back at him sending thousands of angry bees at him (I guess he didn't want a repeat of last year.) As I zipped up my hood, and pulled on my gloves, I outlined to the crowd what we needed to do and in what order we needed to do it.

First we needed to move the ladder and box out of the way. I told him to notch the underside of the branch quickly and then with one hard push, without stopping, no matter what happened DON"T stop, cut though from the top, and the branch will fall straight down. The bees would then be gathered and scooped and put into the newly assembled, lemon scented, hive and we'll hope we get the queen. Looks good and easy on paper, right?

It was at this time that the tree brother decided he would prefer a jacket. We, of course, obliged. First notch made, there's no turning back now. I had images of the rural fire department having to come to our rescue, standing clear from the nightmare and spraying us with water from high pressure hoses to save us. Oh the tales and tongues that would wag at church. The second cut on the branch was underway. Then with a swoosh and a great thud the 12 foot long branch came crashing to the ground. I swear for a moment the swarm hovered in empty air, like in a cartoon, left behind as their host perch abandoned them.

As tree brother scampered to the ground, I pounced on the confused mass. As things get closer they get larger. Let me tell you, there is nothing NORMAL about shaking a nuc box of bees into a hive. There is NOTHING normal about crawling into a hive while bees swarm protectively around your head looking for any available hole to advance their cause. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING normal about plunging both hands deep into the center of a mass of angry, no, down right pissed off, bees. You see, the queen is inside the mass. So you have to go INSIDE the mass.

I went as slowly and as gently as possible, scooping cupped handful after handful of bees into the large box. We looked for the telltale rosette of bees around a queen. There were thousands of bees in the air, thousands of bees on the ground, and thousands of bees still clinging to the branch. Usually swarms happen in the Spring and they aren't really defensive. Someone forgot to tell these bees. People were foreign to them. Here we were, the middle of August and dealing with a swarm. And they were aggressive. My gloves and sleeves were covered in stings, little yellow pulsing packets and their barbed delivery system. Becks was behind me looking through the bees in the giant box looking for the queen as I continued to scoop.

But there was a snag. The box was full of lemongrass oil. The bees were wandering from their queen, IF she was in the box. She could have been on the ground, or still on the branch, or flying around us ticked off that we ruined her Friday night date night. After getting as many bees from the log and ground as I could, I abandoned by position and joined Becks around the box, we were now so focused on the task at hand that we barely noticed anyone else around us. (Although I noticed everyone not in a full suit had back further away as we were lost in a cloud of buzzing horror.) Her brother joined us in our search until an angry minon found its way into his hood and stung him on his lip. He was out.

The heat in the suits was unbearable, but we couldn't stop. The sun was trying to set, but we couldn't stop. Here we were, two adult women, with an audience, on our knees as if in prayer, hovering over a giant box of marching and flying insects, playing the most difficult game of Where's Waldo EVER! Our onlookers were trying to be helpful from a distance - "Is that her?" "What about there?" "How about there?" Between the great distance they were pointing from, and the hyperactive unpredictable movement of our prey, the accuracy of their spotting was just answered with a kind 'nope', 'nope, that's a drone'. Our hands flew. Our brushes brushed. THERE SHE WAS!

Becks pounced on the queen like a cat on a moth. Cupping her hands, she yelled for her husband to run in and grab the excluder box. "SHE'S so pretty!" she exclaimed as she gently opened her hands. It was like that slow motion moment you go through when you realize you've left your keys in the ignition and the car door is swinging shut. She knew what she was doing as she was doing it but there was no going back. With that instant, her royal hiney was gone again. Airborne. "NOOOOOOO!" Becks realized it too. We stood stock still, looking at each other as if we didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I told her we had about half an hour before it was too dark. We dropped to our knees, both in silent beekeeper prayer that the queen had headed for the safety of her royal subjects. At least the fire department hadn't showed up yet. Neither was there a line of traffic stopped to watch this circus from the road. No flashing lights from the Sheriff to keep the curious crowds of gawkers back from what is obviously an idiotic event. No, it was just us, and two billion tired, hot, pissed off bees. OK, queenie where ARE you? The lemon scent was starting to get to the both of us. I was ready to join the swarm and become one with the bees. But would they accept me as one of their own?

I brushed a large drone from my face mesh. "OK Becks, let's assume she's in the box." We opened the awaiting hive, gently shook down the box to one corner, and then into the hive. We then loaded the hive onto it's blocks, which was near the fallen branch. We reduced the entry and slapped on a feeder. (Having no honey or pollen stores and limited time to do so, these bees will need fed all winter just to have a CHANCE to make it. But free is free.) "So ya, think she's in there?" she asked. "Absolutely!" I laughed as I replied. Knowing darn well, there was no way at that moment to know, nor check, or start over.

Still standing in a cloud of bees, covered in crawling and lost souls, we brushed each other down near the new hive. We moved to the center of the yard and repeated the process until we were finally bee free. We double checked for angry stragglers, and then satisfied, mercifully unzipped our hoods and jumpers, and tied the sleeves around our waists. We were soaked to the skin.

Many bees would be dead by morning, having stung for their queen, but the size of the swarm would cover the loss. The next few days would tell the tale. Was the new hive nice enough? Was it large enough? Did the queen like her new open floor plan? How was the landlord?

Here we are. It's the middle of September. The bees are still there. So here's crossing fingers!

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

 

[ewok126]

Ha, that is an awesome story! Thank you for sharing. So we still do not know if we got the queen yes? Now I want to see that "Video" that was spoken of lol. I have a visual in my head from this story. It would be so cool if there was photos from the event. When you told of Becks "gently opening her hands. It was like that slow motion moment you go through when you realize you've left your keys in the ignition and the car door is swinging shut." I swear in my head, I heard Becks ass squeak from drawing up so tight or maybe it was my ass..... Yep it was my ass, it still has a grip on my seat lmaooo. Yelling for the wife to bring me some muscle relaxers and a crowbar.

 

[WthrLady]

We'll go in this week when it cools down and see if we got the queen. We wanted to give the hive a month to settle, and now we want to do it on a day where the weather is more settled and not so windy. We MUST smoke these bees. (lightly of course)

 

[ewok126]

We MUST smoke these bees. (lightly of course)

LOL yeah, I would imagine they will not leave you much of a choice just yet. I will stick to my cigars lmaooooo.... I crack myself up!

 

[CLSranch]

I'm hoping WthrLady since they stayed that queen is there.

 

[CLSranch]

For future reference I was just reading Mother Earth News magazine.

The Center for Food Safety has developed Wild Bee ID, an app for identifying wild bee's and the plants that attract them.
www.WildBeeID.org