Well the last week and a half have been crazy. Almost every day I've been called to collect swarms, some for fellow bee keepers others from members of the public. One couple live next door to a young lady who has decided not to inspect her bees. To date they have thrown a prime swarm and at least 4 cast swarms as a result. I managed to collect 3 of the 4 cast swarms but sadly 2 of them decided to abscond two days later.
Today I was called to collect this swarm. I wondered at the time if they would all fit into my nuc but decided to see what happened.
I returned at 22:00 this evening only to find a thick layer of bees covering the nuc as I suspected they would be. Tomorrow I'll go back with a langstroth deep hive and a frame of brood from one of my other langstroth colonies in the hope its will persuade them to hang around.
The home owner said she had never seen three grown men looking so scared when the swarm began to cluster 20 feet away from them in the tree.
Finally after almost a month of not being able to inspect any of my hives due to constant rain the weather changed. Good thing it did as I found lots of sealed queen cells in two hives, went through both colonies and found both the old queens so quickly artificially swarmed them both by moving the queens and several frames of bees into new hives to simulate as if they had swarmed as I had a couple of spare nuc's on me, also transferred 3 more frames with some brood and the bees covering it making sure none of the transferred frames had a queencell.
Opened up a nuc and found a drone laying queen so removed her before pinching a frame with two nice looking sealed queen cells and a large amount of sealed brood and donated it to the nuc.
At the start of the year I set up a bait hive with several drawn combs. Today I found it has a nice gentle colony in it, they have obviously been in there for over a week as there is a nice patch of sealed brood across the middle of 3 frames surrounded by lots more eggs and larvae. After going through all my other hives just to check they are all queen right with lots of eggs and brood in all stages so I can safely say the swarm wasn't one of mine.
Just need a few weeks of reasonable weather now so the virgins can emerge and get out and mate.
Its not been a great start to the year as I've lost four colonies due to varroa and partly due to starvation. As our Autumn was very mild the bees were out flying through to the start of December they managed to collect a vast amount of Ivy nectar which had set solid when they needed to eat it. Some of these I will melt down and give it back to the bees when I shook swarm them over the coming year instead of feeding them sugar.
Thankfully though its not all bad news, my other 11 colonies have survived and several of them are building up quickly and are very strong. This is a short video of one colony which is in a home made 6 frame 14x12 nuc
