A small brown trout on the Beaverhead River in Montana |
The day after capturing the swarm, Karly and I went into #1. Karly is positive she saw the queen run quickly from one frame into the box below. We did not see her again. Most of the queen cells I had seen on the earlier inspection were gone; we did see two empty queen cells with the tops chewed off. I am certain there is a queen in #1. I will take a look this week to check for larvae. I also exchanged the drone frame. The frame only had some pupae, so I tediously picked them out. There were 349 total pupae, 14 of them had mites- 5%, an ok number for now.
Back to the swarm. I had noticed that there was a casaba melon sized clump of bees left on the Hebe bush. The day before we left for Dillon, Montana, I noted bees still flying around the clump. I could see many of them flying to Olea's hive and some returning from that general direction. I looked closely at the clump and saw bees doing the waggle dance and could tell the direction was toward the apiary. I realized that the bees were scouting for a hive meaning that the queen was still probably in the bush. I hoped that they would decide on Olea's hive; after all, it was a nice place to live and already had comb, as well as a few thousand bees. I decided that when evening came, I would cut the bush and move the remaining workers, and queen of there, to the top-bar hive.
Then, the bees took off from the bush and flew slowly in the general direction of the apiary, then over the fence and out of sight towards Viewpoint. I went over there, but the swarm was nowhere to be seen. I figured that I had not moved the queen into Olea's and that the bees there would eventually die. I emailed Tom Seeley describing the situation and he said "I'm sorry to report that your hive is probably queenless, but of course, time will tell. Give them a week and take a look inside for eggs and larvae."
We returned from a terrific fishing trip yesterday. There I fished the Beaverhead, Big Hole and Ruby rivers. These three rivers flow together to form the Jefferson, a tributary of the Missouri. We floated in drift boats with guides on the Big Hole where Karly caught the most fish!
I took a look into Olea's- new comb with nectar and pollen but no larvae or eggs and no queen seen. A doomed colony. Then, today, I took the bees from the TBH and after spraying them with Honey-B-Healthy, I shook them into hive #2, giving it a big boost in population. I moved the TBH away and left the comb with nectar near the hive for the bees to clean up.
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