Tuesday, April 29, 2014

A swarm for Olea's hive, not

A small brown trout on the Beaverhead River in Montana
There have been changes in the apiary since the last post
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.  

No comments:

Post a Comment