Backyard Chickens & Bees

Damn. Where to begin? Bees. I like them a lot and have been working them this spring to ensure that we get a good honey harvest this year. The existing hives made it through the last winter, which wasn’t really that impressive, considering how mild it was here in the Pacific NW. Nonetheless, I was a bit concerned at some point in February since their numbers were getting lower and lower, and no signs of new brood. So I did what any obsessive beekeeper would do and ordered another two packages of bees to add to the apiary. Shortly after I put in the order, my neighbors beehive decided to swarm (he wasn’t quick enough to catch them), so I checked on mine again and saw that they were starting to build up faster and faster. So I changed the bee order to a single new package and waited on it to show up. A month of waiting is a long time…

This past week has been a flurry of activity with the arrival of the new bees, and the subsequent swarming of the back hive. I now have four bee colonies in my yard, which seems a nice situation. I definitely learned a lot after the swarming, so let’s review…

The new bee package was installed as normal, and I have some video of it floating around. Anyway, that wasn’t the exciting part of the week. While I was putting in the new bees, I also decided to do a full inspection of the other two hives. The front hive (hive #1) is looking great, despite having three deeps still stacked together. The back hive (hive #2) had a couple of capped swarm cells, however. I left those in place, since I’ve read in a number of places that removing capped cells could leave you queenless, but knowing that the bees were likely to swarm in the next few days.

Pre-swarm clustering of the bees. Apparently, the bees will sometimes stage the swarming so that they are ready to go the next morning!

I came home the next day at lunch, and all was well with the three hives, but that evening I came home to two clusters of bees on the hive. Thinking that the bees had gone ahead and swarmed, and knowing that it’d be cold and rainy the next day, I grabbed a nuc box and put both clumps in together. Strangely, the bees kept leaving the box and going back to their respective positions. Over the next couple of days, all of the bees left the box or died. I was a bit disheartened, until Sunday afternoon when the real swarm happened! Turns out that the smaller clusters were just a pre-swarm warm-up in anticipation of the real swarm. Makes sense, since they stayed right on the hive and there was no major cloud of bees and migration to a clump on my neighbor’s house.

So the real swarm happened a couple of days later. That was great, since I was on the back deck watching while it took place. Unfortunately, the first attempt at putting the swarm into a box met with disaster (I lost my balance on the ladder and dropped the box!), but the second try, with some help from my wife, got them all safely into the box and they started calling all the stragglers. When the box was dropped, I was fortunate that there was an apple tree right there to break the fall. So it wasn’t a straight eight-foot drop to the ground, and the bees seemed none the worse for wear. Of course, I heard all about it from the guard bees who kept chasing me off whenever I’d come close enough to check on their condition. Thank god for thick clothing and veils, although I think I might’ve gotten stung a couple of times through my bee suit, which I didn’t realize until the next day.

In an non-ironic but highly coincidental twist on it all, my wife and I had been painting deep boxes and other nuc boxes for the bees when all this went down. Later that same day, there was a new deep box all ready and painted for the bees, so we transferred the new hive over from the cardboard nux box to their final home. This was left in the same location, but will eventually be moved to sit next to the front hive. Following the 2 feet or 2 miles rule, we’ll slowly move it night after night until we have it in position…

Update from later on in the day: the hive swarmed again! This time to a cherry tree in the back yard of my neighbor (I know he must love me and my bees!). They are now caught and in a nuc box, awaiting integration with the swarm from yesterday. I’ll try the newspaper layer trick to get the workers all happy enough and just let the queens duke it out. More on that later. Time to call it a wrap!

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