Ventilation = Important

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.

Week 1 Inspections

After about a week of having Thing 1 and Thing 2 on the porch, we decided to do our first hive inspection.

Thing 1

The bees had built only a minimal amount of comb and were hardly moving around. In addition, there were barely any bees on the frames. The majority of them seemed to be in the big clump where they feel when they were shaken into the hive. This pretty much confirmed our suspicion that Thing 1 was not doing too hot.

Shark managed to find the queen (I couldn't pick her out to save my life.) and catch here in the queen catcher. Unfortunately, when we tried to transfer her to the tube to be marked she squirmed her way out and flew away =x We are not exactly sure where she ended up. After that mishap, we were pretty much convinced that Thing 1 was now queen-less.

Thing 2

Overall, the bees looked great and were moving all over the place. They had already started to build up comb on multiple frames and a few of the cells were actually filled with something! Based on how much we had seen Thing 2 flying this past week, we we're not really concerned about the hive, but we were still impressed with how much work they had already done! We decided not to look for the queen based on our previous Thing 1 experience.

Horton / The Fuzz

Although this hive had only been setup for a few days we decided to bust it open... after all, we were checking the other hives out and couldn't resist. Let me tell you, these are what they are talking about when they say "busy bees". After only being in the swarm box for about two days, they had already built up more comb than Thing 1. These bees seemed to be in good shape, even though they were confined to the swarm box.

After all the inspections were complete, we decided to go ahead and combine Thing 1 and Horton for a couple of reasons...

• The Thing 1 queen was MIA
• Thing 1 had built hardly any comb in over a week
• Horton had a lot of bees to be confined to the swarm box

To pull off this stunt we shook all the Horton bees into the Thing 1 hive... presto complete!

...And then there were two!