So Long and Thanks for All the Sugar Water

If you are a bee keeper reading this then I'm sure you know where this post is headed. If not, let me briefly explain what happens when a bee colony decides it has outgrown its current facilities and wants to look elsewhere for other arrangements. 

When starting a hive, as my wife and I did this past summer, it is very important to check on the little critters at least once per week - which unfortunately my wife and I did *not* do this past summer. In our defense, we were very well intentioned but we just had way too much going on. Even though we had the benefit of attending 'bee school' provided by the local Bee Keepers Association (which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in getting started with their own apiary), I figured that even though they were a little neglected, they were being fed and seemed active so all was good. Wrong. I had only installed the lower hive with frames and had just recently finished assembling the next 10 frames to put in the second hive body but had not put it out yet. 

Well, one day in early June I came home from work and saw a frightening sight. Now, I knew there were a lot of bees in the hive - some 12 or 13,000 - but it wasn't until I saw most of them in a huge clump on the side of the hive that I really got the full effect. I was witnessing a swarm. Now, a swarm is not what the name has come to imply from horror movies. Rather, it just means that they had outgrown their current space and were ready to pack up and move. 

When bees swarm, they send out a small bunch of explorers to find a new location. When they find it, they signal back to the rest of the colony which is waiting patiently in a big ball and they relocate taking their queen with them. When this happens with bees in the woods or elsewhere, you might find them dangling from a tree limb. 

So now here I am faced with this swarm of bees. I had to work quickly, so I ran in the house to tell my wife and we jumped into the bee suits, opened up the hive and literally dumped the bees back into the hive. You would think that they would have just flown off at that point, but it seemed at the time that we had caught it just in time. 

Unfortunately there's not a happy ending to this story. Our hive did not survive the summer. While it seemed that through July and August the bees were reproducing and staying active, we never did find our queen. The only thing that we could think of is that either the queen had in fact flown off with a good portion of the colony, or somewhere along the way we (or the other bees) had killed her. We'll never know what really happened, but it turns out the bees were reproducing, but without a queen. We had a condition wherein the worker bees start laying eggs instead of the queen. Eventually the colony will die off when this occurs.

The upside to this whole thing (if one can be found) is that my wife and I learned the hard way some very useful stuff about bee keeping including how to check for a queen cell, the right way (and wrong way) to remove frames from the hive without squishing anybody along with the simple hands-on inspection of the hive. We plan on attending the bee school sessions again this winter and trying again in the spring with a new colony. At least now we've got all the equipment ready to go this time around. Here are some pictures of the hive taken prior to the mass exodus...