Some bad news I'm afraid. The swarm we got from the removal in Greensburg didn't do so good. The box we put them in was way too small and didn't provide enough ventilation for the trip home. It was really hot outside and although I didn't check them the first day I'm pretty sure they all died before we got home. When I did my day after inspection I first started to use my hive tool and scrape out some of the dead bees that were blocking the entrance - after about a fist full of dead bees I decided to open it up and found the majority..95% dead on the bottom.
I cleaned up as best I could then closed the box and put it in the dumpster. Its sad that I had to learn this way but I know I'll do my best to make sure it'll never happen again. That removal was really fun and we got to bring our friend along to share the experience but due to my lack of knowledge we lost it.
While I was cleaning up we had a few other situations to deal with. The bees from Thing 1 were "bearding" which means they were too hot on the inside and started to accumulate on the outside of the hive, I fixed that by propping the top of the hive open. I think the queen from Thing 1 came back because there was a pile of bees on the ground (alive) so I decided to scoop them up and put them in another mannlake swarm box temporarily. Everything was back to normal after that.
Monday, May 26, 2008
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