The last time I was here it seemed the nuc was ready to swarm so I split it. I took the queen and some capped brood and moved them to a new spot on the stand.

I left 2 frames of young brood and the queen cells with a frame of stores and an empty frame in the same location so they would collect some of the returning foragers.

The main colony looked pretty good.

Today, the old queen was gone, the brood was hatched. There are no signs of laying workers. In the 4 frame split, I was unable to find a queen or eggs but again no sign of a laying worker.

The main colony is a sad story. When I opened the lid, this is what I saw:

This is the bottom board:

An when I tried to smoke them off the frames:

All very sad. The fields around them were sprayed with 2,4-d and paraquat 3 weeks ago. I don’t think that was the problem as I closed the bees during the spraying. I’m packaging a sample to send to the Beltsville Bee lab to see if they might be able to tell what happened.

Very sad.

The remnants of the Cleopatra colony are doing okay. About 6 frames of brood, nice solid pattern.

The small pink colony is still functional. The queen is alive but her brood pattern is not so great. I won’t mind requeening her.

The laying workers still don’t have any signs of a queen. I couldn’t find the virgin I put in there. On the other hand, I also didn’t see signs of a laying worker. Most of the previous drone brood had hatched and I didn’t see new areas of brood. Maybe the virgin is doing her thing? I guess I’ll wait. (I know I said I’d wait a month last time and it’s only been 9 days. Patience is not my best virtue!)

When I got home with the queen, which had been nicely packaged in a queen cage with 2 attendants, it was thunderstorming. Rain! Wind! Lightning! Under those circumstances I figured it was just best to lay the cage on top of the frames and get out of Dodge.

I went back this evening and she was still alive. The colony workers pretty much seemed uninterested. They would crawl across the cage but they weren’t obsessed with her destruction. The original plan was to shake out the bees and then release the queen. I shook one frame and got stung. That was enough for me and I decided to release her immediately. First I gave her a red mark and then let her walk into the frames.

As far as I could tell, the bees seemed to accept her — at least not kill her immediately. So time will tell. I’ll try to leave these bees alone for about a month.

I lost swarms 2 and 3 and these were from my Sally line and the Cleopatra line. These I would have loved to keep. I really should requeen the swarmy hives, but now they are on to the next generation and might be less swarmy for next year.

I really need to read up on how to combine these swarms into an existing hive without the queen. I would just like to get the population up for the black locust nectar flow. I am up to seven hives now and I don’t want that many. Four seems good for me.

The remnants of the Cleopatra colony that provided 3 boxes of honey last year are still uncertain. I had checked it on 4/19 and there was young brood but none capped. That brood is still not capped but looks as though it will be both worker and drone. I haven’t seen a queen. I saw a few well-centered, single eggs in cells but the area covered in brood is about 3 sides of a frame the size of the palm of my hand. Not much.

The single box pink colony received a population boost from Todd’s after swarm. There is a queen and I marked her red.

The laying worker colony/swarm experiment seems to be a fail. No bees in the top two boxes. I’m a little concerned that mood of the laying workers may be changing. Grant was head butted while trying to mow the lawn about 30 feet behind and away from the colony. Might shake out and give up on them soon.

I have a laying worker hive. At least 4 frames of brood. The population in the colony is at least 80% drone. They haven’t gotten mean…yet. I’m hoping to avoid that. So…

I put two screen inner covers on top of the laying worker colony and then placed two boxes for the swarm on top of the inner covers. The bottom swarm box has stores; the top swarm box is checker-boarded drawn comb and foundationless frames. I have a solid inner cover with a top entrance for the swarm.

They seemed to take to it pretty nicely.

The interesting thing is that next to this colony is a very weak colony that I think has a queen but only about a palm size patch of brood.  Some bees on this colony began nasonoving and I think about 25% of the swarm went in here!

So I’ll leave the laying worker/swarm colony alone for about a month and see what happens.  I’m hoping that the queen will mate and lay enough frames of brood to overcome the laying workers.  In the meanwhile I’m hoping the queen pheromone will keep the laying workers calm and I won’t end up with a yard of evil bees again this year!

I’ll check the weak colony in the next few days to see if I can detect if the population went up.

It’s always a learning journey!

UPDATE:  April 24th

First, I’m impatient! A day, a month, what’s the difference?!

Anyway, I wasn’t seeing too much action at the top entrance so I decided to check it out.  Not a bee in the top two boxes.  Not one.

So on the waiting 1 month theory, I will remove the top two boxes and screen and wait a while and see if any of them (the queen in particular) made it into the bottom laying worker colony. Doubtful but possible.

On a positive note, I checked the weak pink colony. The bee count is definitely up.  There is a queen.  I marked her red.

This hive swarmed on either April 14 or April 18. I’m not sure which (there were four swarms in the past week). Something curious happened on April 15. You can see how the hive temperature had been dropping at night closely following the outside temperature, but on April 15 it didn’t stayed warmer all night. I am guessing that maybe this hive swarmed on the 18th after a couple of days of increased activity in the hive. This is just a guess based on a single hive and set of data, but it is interesting. The temperature stayed high and steady even several days after the 18th, however, so I don’t know what that would mean. The Broodminder is just another tool in the beekeeping arsenal, but I am already finding it to be useful and interesting. I have purchased the next generation sensor which will include hive weight. I am very excited to test that one out as well. It is scheduled for June or July, probably available right after the honey harvest which is when it would have been the most useful. There is always next year – if the battery doesn’t die!

I only observed two of the four swarms leaving the hives, so I can’t be sure where the other two come from, but I only had four hives and I don’t think one of them has swarmed yet. That would mean that at least one of these was an ‘after swarm’ and as such will have a virgin queen. This whole concept doesn’t make much sense to be, but Liz is certainly a believer as she experienced four or five after swarms out of her observation hive last season. I should note that two of my hives came from that ‘swarm stock’ of 2015. In fact, this swarm from hive 3 is one of those, albeit a second or third generation, So it could very well be that this is a second swarm from hive 3.

On Monday I observed a swarm collect on a nearby tree trunk. I think it was from hive 3. Liz came over to help collect the swarm. We basically scraped them gently down off the trunk and into a cardboard nuc box and in a few minutes it was apparent that we had the queen as the workers were marching into the entrance. Liz headed home to install these.

The thing to learn here is that this hive made the decision to raise a new queen and swarm before the first of April. March usually still feels a lot like winter around here, but the bees are looking ahead. We had a relatively warm Feb, so that might have contributed to the early build up of bees and the decision to leave. Next year I suppose I should put my honey supers on in March.

This past Monday, I was in my front yard when I saw a swarm on the move. I was hoping that they were going to find a tree to settle on, but it turned out that they were on the move to their new home. I followed them for several hundred yards heading slightly south of due west. I had never observed this before. They stayed in a cloud and were moving at a few miles per hour. I could have easily followed them, but they were heading across many properties and fences and I didn’t want to scare my neighbors or get shot. I took a video of my chase but you couldn’t really see the bees so I didn’t post it.

An hour or two later a second swarm emerged from hive 4. This was the hive set up last year by Kristien and Liz with a reared queen. I think they said that it was from the Cleopatra line. I took three videos of this swarm as it emerged, gathered, and landed. It’s a pretty impressive sight.

When I took a close look at the bees, it didn’t appear that they were doing a lot of waggle dancing, so I assumed that they were many hours away from finding a new home. I ate some lunch, got some boxes ready to receive them and walked back out to the swarm to find that they had left. What a disappointment. They were only on that briar bush for an hour or less. So it was not a good day for me. I lost two swarms. I just hope they found good homes.

Seems I was right.

As I opened the colony:

Not many live bees and dead bees filling the ends of the frames in the front and back. When I got to the bottom board:

Clearly I had a pretty good population going at one point.

I’m pretty sure the culprit was parasitic mite syndrome.  You can see in this next picture that two of the bees have mites attached and many of the cells have the telltale white crystalline remains of varroa poop.

This is about half of what remained of the cluster.  No brood, no eggs.  No queen to be seen.

Unless you look over here!

After several futile attempts to put her in a nuc,  I kind of gave up.  I think I was able to get 7 bees into the nuc with her.  I seriously doubt they’re going to make it. But I seriously doubt they were making it when I disturbed them either!