As Margaret put in her post, this last Thursday, July 7th, our hive swarmed. It would have been a pretty neat thing to see, and it’s really too bad I missed seeing it. It’s also too bad that we missed out on doubling our beehives, and possibly our honey production for the next year. There are many reasons why hives swarm, we think the reason ours did was congestion, and reading about it, in hindsight we had good signs that they were “planning” to do so. We saw a drop off in egg production by the queen and had trouble locating her in the hive (meaning she was “restless” and moving around the frames without laying), we saw lots of capped over honey, and unripened nectar/honey in cells leaving the queen little place to lay (“squeezing” the area that she could lay in), we saw that our girls weren’t drawing comb on the foundation we provided them in the honey super (the “bee logic” being : “Why fix the place up if you’re just going to move again.), and finally we saw all of those queen cells. In hindsight what we could have done better is put the honey super on sooner. Next time, we’ll probably add it the same time we add the second hive body. People worry about the queen laying in the super, however from what we’ve heard the queen will lay in it, the bees will hatch out, and the workers will come back and fill it with honey. The queen generally won’t cross capped honey, so in the late summer/early fall when it’s time to harvest this isn’t a problem any longer. Getting that super on there earlier would have definitely helped with our congestion problem.

Margaret and I felt the need to check our bees after the swarm, we wanted to know what the hive looked like, and what they had been up to. This time we started with the bottom box (as we had decided we would do the last time) – to insure that we didn’t smoke to many bees down into it.

Here’s what we saw:

In the lower box we saw some capped honey, some sporadic brood, uncapped nectar and pollen.

Sporadic brood, with a swarm cell at the bottom of the frame.

Better view the swarm cell – it’s still hard to see with the bees crawling over it – its in the the center of the frame.

A queen cell in the middle of the frame. The hive tool is hanging like the sword of damocles because I cut it from the frame shortly after this picture.

In the upper hive box, we saw lots of capped over honey, very little brood, one or two queen cells, and some nectar and pollen.

A very heavy frame of honey.

Margaret holds a bee-u-tiful frame of capped honey – to bad this ones for the bees. And boy they are heavy.

You can see two queen cells on this frame, one small one in the lower left corner, and one nicely peanut shaped one in the lower right corner. I removed the one on the lower right; I didn’t see the one on the lower left until I looked at this picture.

Why did I remove the queen cells I did? At the time it seemed like a good idea, the bees just swarmed, and I didn’t want them to swarm again. The short answer, of course, is I was being dumb. I asked our bee mentor, Rick, what to do now. He said not to do anything – and that now the bees will sort everything out and will choose the best to be their queen. Only the best ones will come to maturity, and be allowed to duke it out to see who becomes top bee. He said not to destroy the queen cells as “you could destroy the best one.” (Doh!), and to check the bees again in ten days to two weeks to see if we have a laying, mated queen in there.

All in all I removed four queen cells. Luckily, I’m not an experienced beekeeper, and four cells are only a fraction of the cells that is seen in a swarming hive (The Beekeepers Handbook says between 10 and 40), so I didn’t see them all. There probably (hopefully) is still a good cell in there.

In fact I picked up the cells that I removed from the hive and opened them to see what was inside, two had pupae in them in different stages of development. One had a living queen in it, who crawled out of the cell, and into my hand! We put her in the queen cage we had left over from when we hived the bees, so we could decide what to do.

We decided to put the new queen back into the hive (we reasoned that she would either be accepted, or balled and torn apart) and we would be no worse that where we started. It’s possible that she might kill all of the other queen cells in the hive, but if she tries and the worker bees let her, then she is probably the ONE.

It took a while to coax her onto the bottom board.

The reception she got was not the red carpet, in fact it was rather rough, the girls immediately jumped on her back, grabbed her legs and dragged Her Royal Highness into the hive. She didn’t seem like she was too fond of going in either!