Honeybees...you ever seen em do this??!!?

[Dustbuster]

I wanna know how do you reach into the swarm and yank out the queen and carry her to a new home???? I mean this is like sticking your hand in a blender while a child plays with the power button......


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[Sidecarist]

It actually seems worse than that....

Get a box, or other container, a hive body is ideal but I've seen it done with a 5gal bucket. 

Shake the crap out of the branch making the bees fall into the container, hopefully you get the queen.

Take them home and set up a hive body with foundation keep an eye on them. If you have the queen and she likes her new home she will set up housekeeping if not they will fly away again.

If you don't get the queen they will all be dead in about 20 days.

[analog_kidd]

I had one of my honeybee hives swarm last month. When that happens, the queen permanently leaves the hive. They had lots of replacement queens growing, so I was sure they would be OK. A month and a half later I now see there is no queen in the hive. Don't know what happend to the new-born queen. When several are born, usually one becomes the reigning queen and the rest are killed or evicted. The new queen will leave the hive for a few days to mate, maybe she couldn't find her way back, or she got eaten by a bird.

They can make a new queen, but it has to be from an egg that is only a few days old. Since there has been no queen for weeks, there was no viable eggs to use to make a new queen. So, I had to order a new queen to put into the hive. I have never done that before, so it was a new experience.

The bee and a few attendants came in a hollowed out block of wood, and was just shipped in the mail. The post office called and said I had to pick them up. Not sure why they couldn't come the rest of the way, but whatever.

Here is how they came in the mail, and the bees checking her out after I put her on the hive.

 

 

[MacGyver]

That's neat!

[Ronald_55]

I always loved to see those queens come in when my Papaw ordered a new one.

[Esko 270]

I was thinking of this thread yesterday,  there were 20 or 30 flying around our shop on 109,  an hour later I was on a call a few miles away and seen something in the road,  it was several hundred honeybees swarmed together in the road. 

[Sidecarist]

10 hours ago, analog_kidd said:

 The post office called and said I had to pick them up. Not sure why they couldn't come the rest of the way, but whatever.

Here is how they came in the mail, and the bees checking her out after I put her on the hive.

 

You should see the reaction of the post office to several 3lb packages of bees showing up!!! They want you there pronto...

[analog_kidd]

My bees had a rough year this year. The hive that I bought a new queen for, must have rejected her. I had checked on it a few weeks after putting her in, and there was no sign of babies being made, there were very few bees, and there was a nasty wax moth infestation beginning. Wax moths will absolutely destroy your hive. This particular hive had a ton of honey in it, and the wax moths bored thru the comb and all that honey dripped right out the bottom of the hive. Unfortunately That hive did not make it and I had to take it apart.

My oldest hive, however, finally got around to making some honey. This one swarms every year, and so the remaining bees waste a lot of time building back resources. They never seem to be able to make extra honey. Well this year they did. Out of about the 5 frames they filled, I was able to harvest about 12 jars of honey from them this weekend. It's not a lot, but I'm just so glad to see any kind of return on my investment and work.

 

Edited August 7, 2017 by analog_kidd
Typo

[analog_kidd]

I got some more bees this week. Here is how they came in the mail. I had to go get them from the post office. That's a can of sugar water that I removed from inside the containter. To the left is the queen; they keep her seperated in the "queen cage" until the rest of the bees get used to her and accept her. This is actually my 2nd package of bees in two weeks. The first one came in and about 75% of the bees were dead in the bottom of the container. Not sure what happened, but the company I bought them from send out a replacement. I put what was left from the first package into a hive, just to see if they will survive. So far it looks like they are doing ok, but there are very little worker bees in the hive. This one was much better, with just a handful of dead bees.

 

Here they are in the hive after I dumped them in. You can see them gathering around the queen. There is a plug of candy on the end that the bees will eat through. It'll take them a few days to get all the way through, which will give them more time to get used to her. After a few days, they'll eat a hole all the way, and she'll make her escape, and hopefully go to work making baby bees.

 

The hive is ready to go. The part with the screen on it is a feeder with sugar water to help them get started. They are bunching up on the outside, and several of them were flying around doing an orientation flight to calibrate their internal GPS.

 

It's been three days since I did this, and already the bees are coming and going pretty steadily, and bringing back pollen and nectar. I need to check on them this weekend and see if the queen is out of her cage yet.

[Omega]

You guys make use of the wax?  It's a great additive for bullet lube and even to flux your lead when melting wheel weights.