Swarming weather

I was just about to remove another bird box with bees living in it (I now have two on my allotment shed wall) when George's call came through. His garden was full of bees and they seem to be settling high up in one of his conifers. They were on his neighbours side of the tree and too high to get at. The best we could do was to set up another hive and hope that they would come down from the tree into it. By the time I left George's garden they hadn't and they had in fact moved further away and just about out of sight.

Misty's bees that didn't re-queen have three queen cells on the frame that I introduced from the Laburnham bees. So I need a home for two queen cells.

The other 2008 swarm queen that I moved to Postwick had also left her hive leaving a hive full of queen cells. Many open, some torn down and a couple still left intact. I removed a frame with an unopened queen cell on it and put it into a nuc box with a frame of bees. That hive was just about swarmed out. Bad management on my part.

I checked several of the boxes in Postwick. The Lakenham swarm looks a bit sad and I couldn't find the queen. The Bowthorp swarm was fine and slowly filling up the brood box of new frames. The Laburnham bees were making honey. The last of the 2008 queens that I can't find I still can't find. She is beginning to lay a little better now and they may well build up into a useful hive for next year.

The swarm I collected last year and took to Postwick I left in a box without a queen excluder. I thought I would leave them that way as an experiment and see how many boxes the queen would go up into to lay eggs in. I took five supers off today and there were eggs and brood in the top box. With so much swarming going on I thought I had better get these bees under control and find the queen if possible. When I had taken three boxes off and removed several frames that were mostly drone brood I was beginning to wonder if this was wise. I had to stop a couple of times to take out bees from inside the veil on my bee keeping smock. These bees were crawling bees and had crawled up inside. But they weren't stinging me. When there is no queen excluder the bees use the central frames for brood and put honey in the outside frames. In the brood box at the bottom there were still frames of undrawn foundation. The bees had moved up from the center of the brood box and ignored some of the outer frames. I had just got past the center frames and there she was, a red marked queen. There wasn't much red left on her but enough to say she was the queen that came with the swarm last year. I put another brood box on and a queen excluder on top of that. I may go back in a day or two and put all the frames with brood on in one super and put that under the queen excluder too as being so far away from the queen the bees could start making queen cells on those frames.

It was late when I got back to the allotment but not dark. As I walked up the path past the large dog rose I heard a humming. There, just above my left shoulder, was a small clump of bees in the rose. I cut the rose twigs into a nuc box with the bees on before gently shaking the bees off and putting some old frames in for them.

It's the weather for it.