Swarm Season

[Vance G]

Swarm season! I just got a call and took five pounds of someones dark bees out of a lilac. I put them in a box of drawn comb that was about half full of capped honey. I am thinking that since we are now into that spring fruit flow, I should throw on an excluder and a comb honey box! Wish I had a super of honey I know isn't part sugar water and I would put that underneath another queen exluder.

As I was leaving I happened to see in the neighbors yards SIX HIVES behind a garage. Wonder what the side story is when a lady finds me on the internet and offers to pay me to come get a swarm????

[Colino]

Good catch Vance. That is early so you should be able to get a good crop of them plus 5lbs of bees in a swarm can draw a lot of comb. You mentioned you have a flow going on and I'm convinced we do too. I mixed up some 1:1 for my packages coming Friday so I put some out for my girls yesterday and they won't even touch it. So today I put out a couple of jars of honey and the girls still won't touch that. They are flying strong and it made me wonder what is going on so I opened things up and my Italians have filled 9 frames in the top box and 8 frames in the bottom. Lot's of brood in all stages, eggs but no drone brood or swarm cells and lots of open nectar and pollen. I'm thinking maybe when I pick up my packages I should buy a queen and split them. My feral hive is a real dog, barely 7 frames of bees in one box, small patches of brood. I'm not sure how much more time I should give her before I pinch her. She's a nice looking dark queen but maybe I should buy 2 queens.

[Vance G]

That is a rough one if you think it is survivor stock I suppose. Maybe you could put her in a mini nuc with a couple of frames and requeen the rest. If the weather is warm and the bees are making honey from something then she should be laying one side of a frame at a time even if there aren't the bees to raise them. Where do you get your queens from this time of year? Are they relatively easy to get?

[Colino]

Where do you get your queens from this time of year? Are they relatively easy to get?

I'm hoping they will have some extra New Zealand queens at Scandia Honey where I get my packages, like they did last year. I'm going to give them a call tomorrow to see if they have any coming, if not I'll have to shop around.

[karen]

Tell me about bringing queens into Canada. What places can you bring in queens from? If they are warmer climates like New Zealand what is your experience with winter survival?

I know you can not bring in US packages but can you bring in US queens? If you can bring in US queens are you limited to queens from certain areas in US because of AHB?

[Colino]

Tell me about bringing queens into Canada. What places can you bring in queens from? If they are warmer climates like New Zealand what is your experience with winter survival?

I know you can not bring in US packages but can you bring in US queens? If you can bring in US queens are you limited to queens from certain areas in US because of AHB?

If my New Zealand hive is any indication winter survival doesn't seem to be a problem it is booming and needs to be split. I did lose my other one over winter but I went through the frames from it again and now believe it was Varroa that got them. As for queens I don't know Karen, I haven't looked into it that far yet. Maybe Allen could respond here and educate us all about the rules and regulations of importing queens. I know of 2 Canadian queen suppliers, http://www.pedersenapiaries.ca/index.html and http://saskatraz.com/stock.htm. I phoned yesterday and my bee supplier has some queens for sale. Off to pick up our packages this morning we'll be installing them tonight after dark.

[Allen Dick]

We can bring queens under permit from New Zealand, Chile, some parts of Australia (I think), some US states, Hawaii, and any place that has Food Inspection Agency CFIA approval. They would not let me bring in queens from my friend in Argentina.

The Canadian CFIA policies are steered IMO by politics, but cloaked in biased 'science'. I recall dealing with various higher ups in the agency in the past and having drinks with the head of the honey section of the agency once. What a clown. That was many years ago and I imagine he is long gone now or I would not mention it.

There is no real, consistent logic to CFIA bee-related decisions other than these decisions keep a lot of fellow gov't people employed doing nothing useful at great cost to the taxpayer and to beekeepers who are denied access to more cost-effective replacement stock sources.

CFIA decisions IMO are unduly influenced by government employees intent on empire building, and hyping low-grade bogeymen like SHB and AHB, etc. keep the boondoggle going. To me, CFIA stands for 'Canadian Food Infection Agency' due to their huge and costly misses on a number of serious food contamination cases.

[Colino]

I bought 2 queens today and they are from California, it seems all the New Zealand queens were needed for packages. They are definitely young queens looking at the size of them.

[karen]

I just picked up a very disorganized swarm. They never really clustered, they were all over a sign post. It was a south bound off ramp from highway 295 to Desert Road so I am calling them Desert Swarm. Right when I got out of the truck they started stinging me so I had to wear a bee jacket and they were relentless on my hands so ended up in gloves too. They must of been hit by a car because there where a few 100 dead bees on the ramp. I backed my truck up to the post and put a bee box on the tail gate and they started going in. I happen to have a nuc in the way back of the truck and they found that too. So half went in the 10 frame box and half went in the nuc. So they are still disorganized.

The police called me to go get it. They said people coming off the ramp were calling about it, they got about 30 calls in 45 minutes.

2015-05-26 16.37.24.jpg

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[Allen Dick]

Is there a queen? Also, do you have deserts in Maine?

[karen]

I never saw the queen and they were spread out so it was easy to look. There were a few 100 bees dead on the ramp so may be she was hit by a car. I will go back to pick up the rest this evening, there were a lot in the air still and some wanted to stay on the sign post. I will bring a spray bottle of sugar water to stick them together.
http://www.desertofmaine.com/
Freeport is a big tourist spot and that ramp is really busy. I bet a few 100 cars and about 50 tractor trailers went by me while I was trying to get the bees. No one offered to help.

[JackGrimshaw]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Desert_Island

Maine's only fjord (I think)

[karen]

My desert bees were taking this exit off highway 295.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SfEcntKSH8

I fed them and yesterday checked them for a queen, didn't find one. I would say today with their bellies full and a queen in the hive they have had an attitude adjustment. I won't bother them for a while. I think they milled around on the exit ramp before landing on the sign and several cars drove through them. There were many dead bees on the tarmac. Probably it is where the queen was killed, hit by a car.

[Colino]

I received a call about a swarm at the Rolling Pin Bakery in Bow Island last Wednesday the 17th. I took the swarm with my Beevac because there were too many people around and they didn't want bees flying spooking their customers. They were on the side of a large planter pot probably about 5lbs because I had to give them 2 boxes when I put them in the bee yard. Something like this always happens right before I have to leave to peddle fried chicken for the weekend and the next day before I left I noticed that they were clustering on the front of the hive with all kinds of scouts waggle dancing for new homes. I quickly started looking for a frame of brood and noticed my hives are starting to get plugged with honey. So I just grabbed a frame of open brood from a Nuc, shook/brushed the bees off and gave it to the swarm. It was amazing in about a minute they started to break cluster and go into the hive. In the two boxes I gave them I only put in 1 frame of drawn comb and the rest with foundation. The comb drawing power of a 5lb swarm is awesome they had just about completely drawn 2 frames out in less than 24 hours. When I got home yesterday they were still here. Today before I super hives I will take them off the beevac bottom, replace it with a bottom board and remove the separating screen shim.
This is how I built my Beevac,https://youtu.be/922gkjV3iqA it works great, out of that whole swarm there were maybe 50-60 dead bees.

[Vance G]

I got three calls in April for swarms and since the phone hasn't rang. One of those swarms had filled seven and a half frames and I had put a plugged medium of honey under them that I wanted them to move up. They then swarmed on me! They took the biggest queen I have ever seen! She must be a frequent and good flyer. I wanted to raise some queens from her and did from the surplus cells. Two of them went down the road to a friend of mine just yesterday and I am officially in my dotage as I am concerned they will be just wasted as he is trying to requeen failed packages that lost queens.

[Colino]

I caught another swarm last evening. I got the call at supper time, it was a classic capture. Climb the ladder, cut off the branch, carry them down and shake into the hive body. Like the last one they need a second box already. We are expecting a couple weeks of really hot weather and we are having a massive nectar flow, so I'm gonna give them a deep of foundation to see if I can get some drawn comb. It is turning into a bang up year for swarms here in sunny Southeastern Alberta. It seems the warm dry spring has caused an early nectar flow and is catching a lot of the bigger guys with their pants down.

[Allen Dick]

With thousands or tens of thousands of colonies within your local radius, some swarms are inevitable. If 1% of those hives swarm and you hear of 1% of that 1%, that still adds up.

Swarming cannot be completely suppressed as it happens for many reasons besides crowding, and even tiny hives in ideal conditions can swarm.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=causes+of+swarming+bees

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/swarmtrigger.html

[Colino]

With thousands or tens of thousands of colonies within your local radius, some swarms are inevitable. If 1% of those hives swarm and you hear of 1% of that 1%, that still adds up.

Also there would be a certain unknown percentage that would be swarms from non-managed feral hives.

[Colino]

I took a look inside this recent swarm and I'm embarrassed to say I'm not much of a beekeeper seeing as how this swarm has more bees than my overwintered hives.

[Colino]

Another swarm call today. I got there about 20 minutes too late, they had just moved inside the garage wall. Tomorrow I will go cut them out from the inside because it is only sheeted with corrugated metal sheets screwed in place. Removing 1 sheet will expose 12 feet of wall and I would have done it this afternoon but it was just too damn hot! 36C (96.8F)