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!