Well, It's Happened Again!

[catjac1975]

Are they wild bees? Can you add wild bees to your hives safely?

 

[JimWWhite]

Are they wild bees? Can you add wild bees to your hives safely?

They could be but I suspect this swarm probably came from one of our own hives. My guess is if we were to go in and pull the frames one at a time from the hive body we'd probably find Swarm Cells on the bottoms of the frames. The hive body is the largest box at the bottom of the stack of a hive. Normally a hive only has one hive body but you can add two or even more. I don't know why you'd do that but it can be done I guess. The hive body is where the queen resides and lays the eggs that become brood and come out in a few weeks as young worker bees. Most beekeepers put a queen excluder on top of the hive body to keep the queen who is larger than a worker in the hive body or brood chamber as it is also known as. This keeps her from laying eggs in the medium or shallow boxes where you want to take your honey from. You don't want to try to harvest honey from frames that may have brood in them. Messes up the taste and smell of the honey.

Anyways, back to the Swarm Cells. For some unknown reason the worker bees will get it in their little bitty minds that they have to swarm. This generally happens in a mature colony. The existing queen may be a strong queen and is doing what she is supposed to do and that's to lay eggs. But maybe it's they think the hive is getting too crowded or something. They just do it. But when this idea comes into their minds they set about making Swarm Cells. This will be a cell where the queen has layed an egg at the bottom of one of the frames in the hive body. Then the workers start making this into a queen cell by feeding the larva only royal jelly which forces the larva to become a queen. All bees get some royal jelly but when bees make a queen I guess that's all she gets to eat. These swarm cells then become easy to spot because typically they are hanging vertical at the bottom of the frame. They look like a little peanut hanging down. When the new queen exits the cell in a few weeks she goes on a mating flight and becomes inseminated and returns to the hive. Then half the worker bees in the colony muster up and take the new queen and bolt the hive. Sometimes it may be the old queen but normally it's the new one. They'll find a nearby limb or an eve or somewhere they can hang around until the scouting bees find a suitable home. Or we see them first and we find them appropriate living quarters in a new hive. Ka-Ching... $100.00 saved.

Teresa was going to go in today and work the hives but it's been cold, rainy and windy all day here in central NC. What she needs to do is to find those queen cells and do what they call a Manual Split which is a method of pulling frames from an existing hive where there is a swarm cell on one or more of the frames and putting those in a new hive body. She'd replace the ones she removed with fresh new frames that the workers will draw out into comb and use for new brood. She might pull three or four of the frames from the original hive to go into the new one. She has to make sure she doesn't move the original queen to the new box. It's sometimes pretty hard to find that gal in the mist of all the bees on a frame all moving around. But sometimes the queen makes it easy because she may be marked with a colored paint dot on her back if you got her from a breeder. But queens will scurry all over the frame very quickly if disturbed and she will give herself away with her motion most of the time. For some reason I can see that and Teresa can't.

But once the frames have been moved to the new hive body she'll probably destroy all but one of the queen cells. If a queen dies before it can emerge from the cell the workers can always make another. It just sets back the process a few weeks. Once everything is cleaned up I'll set up a stand with two cinder blocks and some pressure treated cross members and we'll set the hive on it and walk away. If the split happens later in the year when there's not a lot of pollen or nectar flow going we'll probably put on a feeder tray and fill it with 50/50 mix of sugar water to get them started. Right now that's not necessary.

Sorry, you asked what time it was and I told you how the watch was made. Just me rambling along popping off...

 

[thistlebloom]

Jim, thanks for going into such detail, I find everything about bees fascinating, and you have such an enjoyable style of explaining.

You mentioned that you were able to spot the queen more easily than Teresa. According to a study that was published in an online science journal there is an actual marked difference in vision between men and women. They found that women are better at distinguishing colors than men, but men, having 25% more neurons in the visual cortex have more sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving images.

Now I understand my disagreements with my husband over paint colors!

 

[JimWWhite]

Jim, thanks for going into such detail, I find everything about bees fascinating, and you have such an enjoyable style of explaining.

You mentioned that you were able to spot the queen more easily than Teresa. According to a study that was published in an online science journal there is an actual marked difference in vision between men and women. They found that women are better at distinguishing colors than men, but men, having 25% more neurons in the visual cortex have more sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving images.

Now I understand my disagreements with my husband over paint colors!

Well now, keep in mind that men are just like dogs except we can only see the primary and secondary colors. Well, there's a few others like brown, black, pink, and chartreuse. We can't tell taupe from rope or periwinkle from Bullwinkle. I was probably fifty years old before I found out that fuscia was some shade of purple or pink. I always assumed it was green. Like I said, we can tell chartreuse because we have fishing lures that color...

 

[JimWWhite]

Are they wild bees? Can you add wild bees to your hives safely?

CatJack, I'm sorry I really didn't answer your question about adding wild bees to a domestic hive. No, you probably couldn't do that. If you dropped a bunch of bees you captured into a hive already occupied you'd probably have a miniture WWIII on you hands inside the hive. You'd probably come out the next day and there'd be a pile of dead bees under the entrance of the hive. No, it would be best to find a hive body and frames, etc. and start a new hive. Today with the woodlands being reduced more and more and people more spread out, truly wild bee colonies are becoming pretty rare. There are probably a lot of feral hives like the one we lost a couple of weeks ago but I'd be willing to bet someone probably found them and called a local beekeeper to come and get them. Most Sheriff's offices have the numbers of beekeepers in their counties who'll come out and remove swarms.

 

[journey11]

So when you need to harvest the honey, that's when the bees are most agressive? Is that when most people get stung? Journey11, do you suppose your allergy developed from the number of stings you received?

Sorry 'bout that...by robbed, I meant being robbed out by other bees... As Jim said, when the beek smokes them getting ready to take off honey for themselves, they are calm.

(I never had a bee allergy until after I was stung by a wasp and broke out head to toe in hives. I was never allergic to wasps either up until that time and had been stung many times before with no problem. Just one of those weird things that happens getting older I guess.)

 

[Jared77]

Jim that was fascinating thank you for taking the time to post that. I'm totally fascinated by bees, their efforts and everything else is just amazing. When the kids are older I might set up a couple hives. They may even need to be moved out not sure yet. Right now the space is necessary for playing and just being kids.

I saw a swarm last year when we were looking at houses. Was on a chain link fence. Scared my wife and the Realtor half to death because I got pretty close to them in just short sleeves and a T shirt to observe them. I got more than 1 warning that if I got stung it I had to deal with it because we had 2 other houses to look at. They didn't bother me at all.

I always appreciate the knowledge that folks share on here. I'm impressed with how many hives you've got going there that's for sure. Not only will you have saved $100, you'll have that much more honey to sell increasing your overall profits. Good job and please keep us posted!