buzzzzzzzzzz new adventure

addy1

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The battery died, it took us around 1.5 hours. You need to wait for the nurse bees to cluster around the queen then you put her and the cluster in a hive body with frames.

This is the cluster, they gather around the queen. There are two clusters. We had to block the light with the foam board they are looking for a dark area. It is really neat to watch them crawl up the board and over the edge. The workers all fly back to the original hive around a foot away.
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Due to our record breaking 20 straight days of measurable rain, the hives have been house bound. They get bored. they get feeling crowded, they eat up their stores, they decide it is time to do a population divide. So they start making queen cells, swarm cells. When we inspected their hives, there was around 15 swarm cells, queens in the making.
That was the day before we did this. On this day, we found around 6 uncapped empty swarm cells, i.e. the queens had hatched. But it was rainy cold wet windy, they need two days of sun to mate. So for a bit the old queen might live with the virgin queen, there may be more than one virgin in the hive. The strongest will survive. They sting each other to death. The old queen usually loses the battle, they are not as flexible as the young queen so can't bend and sting.

Usually the swarm happens long before the virgin queens hatch. But weather is delaying the swarm. The next sunny day, which is Friday, they would have swarmed.

So the long and short answer, we took the clusters, might be the old queen under one, a virgin under another, were all carefully dumped into the hive body we had below them. The hive body was taken over and set up as a hive. two boxes, frames, and food. They might abscond, ie leave, but last check they were still in the box. So it was a success. Now in two weeks we need to check for eggs larvae etc. Then it really is a success. Ae we need to check the worker box with all the swarm cells to make sure one of the queens hatches and starts making babies.

So in their bee brains they swarmed, they will not try to swarm again, we are almost out of swarm season. Once nectar flow starts they forget about swarming.
 

addy1

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Yay, happy ending to the bee story!

You and those people you are helping are gonna be up to your elbows in honey

If it stops raining. ....................15 degrees below normal, abnormal rain i.e. constant. The bees need SUN low winds to gather nectar.
 

callingcolleen1

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Wow those bees sounded pretty mad! Ouch, getting stung three times must really hurt. Wonder if there are any benifits to getting stung. I heard some medical practices involve getting bee sting, can't quite remember what it was supossed to treat. I will have to look it up...
 

addy1

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Wow those bees sounded pretty mad! Ouch, getting stung three times must really hurt. Wonder if there are any benifits to getting stung. I heard some medical practices involve getting bee sting, can't quite remember what it was supossed to treat. I will have to look it up...
I keep a tub of unkers in my bee suit the moment I am stung I walk away, smear on unkers, the pain swelling goes away.

Bee stings are supposed to help a lot of things, we will see, we don't get stung that often.
 

addy1

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Well another adventure..................

We got a call from a friend around 1/2 mile away, he had a cloud of bees settling into a small tree, 4 feet from ground. We grabbed our last box, empty foundation, rand new bottom board, etc and ran over there.
We find maybe 10 bees hanging onto a branch. But we see bees flying around, so we look behind the fence the ground was covered with bees.
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Having no clue what to do, we set up the box, the guy got a dust pan we were thinking of slowly sweeping them up. While they were gathering stuff, I took a bottle of sugar water with some lemon grass oil, I had mixed for the swarm we hived yesterday.

I shook it all over the top of the hive box, empty foundation, put a cut piece of insulation foam on the top to make it dark for them except for a tiny gap.

Next thing you know the bees butts are up in the air and they are fanning. Then the neatest thing happened! all the bees turned towards the hive box and started marching in.

ryWd-KQBPW80w625kzSYNvMSSqKoBsnM2HBVC5AknlfLx0EqZg-yxlvhIoqZFAuMKue46aPjhZR7_zLkTO4mMy0XWbipRS8gOt8f5QC2GGKQz4OpVPRNIObpixaHg0D_LraiaXChWJKDkELFv000iw9PFcN-KFDUg_YPIRTzuf6EFmRkcu-49AMSNFdTb5BW4sh8OzVr7i1N8GQxEd0EFe22lhB2dNlUbg9alNb0OONL8mUAdv_wx69b0-DC3dM6FIZ2fLEMDCfMxRJT-I8Ap6t5D_BO5_yomkGStB4M-oNwKGN0mAVVW8kZ3fmOMcCFLiQUQwS6jeedgv9oOGuIqq1kjrgLm1qHcknkOMAMwEW3j0daxuzJGc4wIW4s2JVBCO9K8vjROT3iTGNBwZrNVPSNpL-mk-JXXeq_cBLOm1xYoKrUJcr3HytCMToaJ_g0CSvY-k79A5dK00vxiKjE5EXtvWUTce94lNO3Sun38Whk5sGQUPJYUh4tlDtdL63kBT002c_zY_g1RWvQ8i2FFPHLa6z4ZONX0KREi0XM3NnFad_ftrS9NkyPTU7At-A8SAS3bHwJ0JonG_-Z_HLYtGzvSxfCBi-u=w1910-h1432-no



My wonderful husband found the queen crawling in the grass right after this picture, about a foot from the hive box heading the wrong direction. We encouraged her to enter the hive, she nicely did.
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bee swarm








 

addy1

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This a go pro video, around 13 minutes in, sort of, my dear honey finds the queen! We have trouble finding the queen, so to find it crawling on the grass was astounding to us.

I picked her up by her wings, managed to get her closer to the hive, put her down, but she did not crawl in. So we look and find her again, this time I take a piece of dead something and encourage her to crawl the right direction.

Swarming bees are very peaceful, you can actually work on them without protection, might get a random sting. They are so full of honey for their new home they are like a overfed man on thanksgiving, just want a nap.

Dear honey does not want me to work them without protection on, he worries.

 

j.w

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I'm sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for you to find the queen! The moment came when Mr Mark found her and the excitement begins. Now you are looking for her again....................waiting, oh there she is and you did that little shove and yay you got your queen in her new home
 

addy1

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I'm sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for you to find the queen! The moment came when Mr Mark found her and the excitement begins. Now you are looking for her again....................waiting, oh there she is and you did that little shove and yay you got your queen in her new home
It was exciting, you lose the queen, you lose the hive eventually. If you don't see her then you have no clue if she is there, so you wait then if she is really gone the workers become layers and the only way to fix that is dump the hive. Or you buy a queen and you still have a queen, spend 38 bucs and they kill her since there is a queen in the hive.

Do you know of anyone in the area that had bees that swarmed
No nobody close, our neighbors a mile away we did swarm prevention by splitting the hive.

Do you know people charge mega bucks to remove bees to a safe place ;)
Here a lot pick them up for free, but if in a building they charge for the removal. A healthy swarm is worth around 130 bucks if not more. You pay 90 for a package which is a queen and 10000 bees, 3 lbs. The ground swarm was around 25 lbs of bees. A good healthy swarm.
 
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A couple of days ago I got my first swarm call, but when I arrived the bees had already left. I decided to get back into bees this year and built several hives to be sure and be ready to catch a few swarms, but no luck so far. Weather has been unsettled here in northern AZ but finally it is warming up. I live at 7200' elevation, and it is just now above 40 F for low temps. It is mostly Ponderosa pine forest in this area, with scattered meadows that get covered in wildflowers in the mid-summer to early fall. Winter drags on with freezing nights until mid May. Kinda of hard for the bees, but they persist.

Down in the lower elevations of Arizona the Africanized bees are now common and are extremely aggressive. Rumor has it that they don't overwinter well at all in the higher elevations, as they originated in the tropics. I hope it's true, but they have hybridized with our more docile bees, and it could be that the aggressive traits are inherited along with the ability to overwinter in a colder climate. If that happens these mean bees could keep spreading north across the county and even into Canada. Let's hope not.

A bee attack fatality just occurred near Mesa AZ: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/05/26/hiker-dies-bees-attack-arizona/85009394/
 

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