Cranberry

Its been a while since I received a swarm call and this one I've been sitting on for two weeks. The reason? Well, from the initial phone call it was made clear that the evil "spray" was in play. That is she had used some insecticide hastily and that is usually the kiss of death for the fragile honeybee. My thinking was that even if the bees could overcome the spray chances are the queen would not and they would all end up kicking the bucket. After two weeks I finally got up the nerve to make the hour long trip to see for myself. Most of the pictures I took turned out blurry but you can get the general idea of how it was set up.

The bees were under her deck about 10-12feet up. There is a gas line that ran through a hole in the deck that wasn't blocked off, which is where she told me she had sprayed. Initially I thought this was going to be a full out hive removal but when I got there I tore off the paneling on the overhang and peeked inside to find nothing. So what this really was simply a swarm; they were most likely getting ready to go inside that hole when the spray entered the picture and that stopped them in their tracks. Instead of setting up shop inside the hole they started right where they had landed. In the middle of that swarm ball was a good fist sized set of comb.

Now after I had cut off the comb and brushed the majority of the bees in the swarm box I was surprised to see a good bit of fanning. This is usually an indication that the queen is inside. I wasn't able to find her however and after inspecting the comb I found no evidence of brood; which is usually an indication of problems with the queen, or lack of a queen. Either way this swarm is acting very strangely. For temporary purposes I set them up with a nice hive box on the porch and the morning after I dumped them in I found them all up under MY overhang, just like they were an hour away.

I will have to remove them and just dump them in the forest somewhere. Hope for the best but I don't think these survivors are going to last much longer. I can't risk combining them with one of my newer swarms due to the poison factor. I don't have any frames of brood to give them to make a new queen either. It wasn't a complete waste tho, I was able to help this very nice lady out and she contributed a very nice donation for my times. Great experience!

First visit

It was about two weeks since we moved the bees from our porch to my mentors bee yard. Dingo had been bugging me for a while to plan a trip and I really wanted to see how they were doing too. I put the call in to let my mentor know we were planing on coming over in the evening hours before it got dark, so most the bees would be home and not as busy as they would have in the middle of the day. Its been really hot out so I wanted a bit of night time so it wouldn't be too stressful on the bees. We brought our camera, smoker and jacket but forgot our hive tool. Gotta remember to have that every time!

Bad news first; one of the swarms just up and left. The ones from penn hills unfortunately. I read somewhere that if the bees are relocated too close to their swarm point that there is a good chance they would just swarm again to a new location so thats probably what happened. Its disappointing but that kind of stuff happens and I still got to enjoy the experience of removing the swarm from that neighborhood.

Since I brought my bees over Jim (aforementioned mentor) told me he was getting swamped with swarm calls at least another 7 calls in the two weeks; which was odd cause I have not gotten any. Maybe Ian (bee control) thinks I'm too busy with school. I guess I should be thankful because I don't have the space for bees just yet but Jim said he didn't mind if I brought over more swarms and hives. I know he's running low on equipment and he is planning on harvesting some honey in early July.

Thing 1 and 2 are doing fantastic, both built up into the top box twords the right so during the inspection I flipped the boxes to encourage them to build in the bottom (now top) box as well. We had a good 3-4 frames with capped brood, honey in the corners, and nice solid brood pattern. I didn't see either of the queens but I wasn't really looking for them. We poked some of the caps from the honey in the corners and had our first sample. It was really light tasting and sweet. It looked clear as opposed to the orange/gold tint that honey from the stores have. Jim says its from the wild lotus flowers located somewhere in the near by forest. There were also some really bright colored pollen. Reds, oranges, and yellows that the bees used in some of the more empty frames.

All is well! I'm excited to sometime soon get our own property so that I can visit the yard more often, if only to watch them fly as they go about their day. So relaxing.

West End - Hive

This is the first time I've been called via a swarm call and instead of a swarm, I found a hive! It was built into this building near some local business, a school, and a church! Really small tight knit community in the west end of Pittsburgh. Really fun to find this one but I haven't been able to do anything with it yet. From the pictures you can clearly see the bees "bearding" they do this to keep cool on hot days. This is obviously what caused the phone call for help. My guess is the bees overwintered in this building and are coming out strong. They could have been there even longer!

I won't know more until I get some more equipment and the owner of the building gives me the goahead to tear down the boarded up entry way to see what I'm dealing with. I'm planing on there being a good bit of build up inside the walls. So far as I can tell there is only one entrance way, the little hole visible above the grouping. I've never done this before but I'm confident I can do it if I get the tools to work it properly. I'm thinking at least a sawzall and if possible a "beevac" which I'd have to construct myself. I'm looking forward to all of that! I'll update more on this when I can - so far there is not much known.