Last Friday I got a text from my bee mentor that she was going to get a swarm for me–for me? Wow! I wanted to build my apiary up to 10 hives this summer–and she said she would help me do that! She told me to bring over 2 complete hives and we’d put the swarm in them.
Uh…..oh my gosh! I had to scurry around to put foundation in several frames because she said that swarms would build out wax foundation really quickly. It’s always good to have “drawn comb” around when working with bees, so I wanted to use as new foundation much as possible.
After all the equipment was gathered, I headed to her house and we hived the swarm:
There were so many bees in the swarm she wanted to use 2 hives. When we dumped all the bees out of the swarm box, the majority of them seemed to be going in the hive on the left, but a couple of days later both hives seem equally populated and happy.
After the swarm was settled in the hives we took off to a “bee tree cutting” that one of our fellow beekeepers was handling.
Neither one of us had ever witnessed a bee tree removal, but it was fascinating. The tree was really dangerous to cut but he and his son cut the tree down, and after about 1/2 hours of searching, the queen was located, placed in the hive he brought to put the bees in, and we left the bees all filing into their new home.
Then we went back to my bee buddy’s house and grafted 30 larvae into queen cups. Man, that’s tedious work! The things we do for bees……
Wild Things Farm 