Image Copyright 2003 David L. Green Use without permission is theft.
A Swarm That Came to Me
While I Was Making Nucs
Image Copyright 2003 David L. Green Use
without permission is theft.
A Hard Day's Work
Seventy nucs make my trailer tires a little squishy, but this represents a long, hard day splitting bees. These baby hives or nucleus colonies are like the calves from the cow. The cow is the hive that made it thru winter in good shape and is ready to reproduce. Think of the colony as the organism, each bee is just a cell in the organism.
Strong hives will usually throw off a swarm or two or three in the spring. But we cannot afford to have our calves run off and be lost in the woods, so we try to keep ahead of the hives by helping them do what they want to do - reproduce. Most often the swarms we do see are 40 feet up in a pine tree - and many times we are not in the bee yard to even see swarms. While we may lose a swarm from an occasional hive, we don't lose many. Splitting the bees in a timely fashion is the best swarm control a beekeeper can have. Swarming bees are a symptom of a lazy beekeeper, who is throwing away his resources.
Each nuc includes frames of brood with adhering bees, honey and pollen, and empty comb. Then we add a queen cell or a caged queen. This trailer has some 4-frame nucs on the right, and some 5 framers on the left.
Image Copyright 2003 David L. Green Use
without permission is theft.
While I was working I heard the heady sound of a zillion bees heading into the air. I walked across the bee yard toward the sound and found this hive that was throwing off a swarm. The old queen was probably already in the air, and bees were excitedly chasing her odor. They were swirling all around me in the mad excitement. You can see the blur of a bunch of bees that were either out of focus or moving too fast for the camera shutter to catch...
Image Copyright 2003 David L. Green Use
without permission is theft.
Within a few minutes they began to cluster on a couple boxes of Pierco frames I was using as a workbench. The queen must have landed on them. I did not bother to look for her, but quickly grabbed a hive body, put in two frames of sealed brood, a frame of mostly honey, a feeder, and the remaining frames of foundation. I shook the bees off the cardboard boxes onto the deep wooden box, and they waltzed right in.
Image Copyright 2003 David L. Green Use
without permission is theft.
Some of the bees did fly back to the Pierco box for awhile. They loved it so much, they wanted to linger. You can see the hive body I provided in the foreground. The cover was left ajar so bees could enter easier. After awhile we put the hive on a pallet to replace a missing winter deadout.
Beekeepers have a running debate about the newer plastic frames and foundation. Some love them; some hate them; not too many are in-between. But these bees have cast their vote for Pierco, one of the brands of plastic frames....