Swarm Trap occupied!

I got an email from my dad on May 30th with a picture of one of my swarm traps; the one at his cousin's house.

This trap had been in the tree for a couple weeks. It was only about 6 feet off the ground and is baited with a piece of old comb from a house cutout. 

Over the next couple days, I had my dad go over and take a look at the trap and see if it was actually occupied, or if he was seeing scout activity. A couple days later he confirmed they were bringing in pollen, so that confirmed there were bees living inside. How exciting!

On Monday, June 4th at dusk, I went over to Salem, screwed a board over the entrance hole, put the trap in the back of the Jeep and went back to Canton with it. I set the trap up on the hive stand where the hive would be permanently located and took the cover off the entrance. 

On Wednesday the 6th, I moved them into their hive. The bees occupied about three frames and had already drawn a nice amount of comb. There were only two or three dead bees in the bottom of the box, so the move from Salem to Canton must not have been too jarring.

This is how it looked inside the swarm trap

 They had built up two frames about like this.

The stragglers made it inside once the frames were transferred.

One of my favorite bee pics to date - workers fanning Nasonov pheromone inviting their sisters inside.

Swarm Trap Worked!

I stopped at Essie's after work on Friday to check on the swarm trap. Much to my amazement, as I pulled in, there was a swarm converging on it! I took a crappy video with Essie's camera:

Pretty awesome! I have never been around that many bees at a time. The roar of them was crazy, and it was so cool to be able to walk into the swarm and have them flying around me.

The plan was to give them a couple days to get established, and pick them up on Monday or Tuesday. When I talked to Essie on Saturday afternoon, though, she said there are "some bees" still clustered on the outside. That's odd... So the plan changed - I would go over to Essie's Saturday night, shake the clustering bees into a bucket, bring the trap and the extra bees home and put them in a hive. Easy peasy!

Well... not so easy. When I got to Essie's a found this:

That's a whole lot of bees! I climbed the ladder, brought down the trap and tried to shake the bees into a trashcan. When I tried, though, I found that they had started to build comb on the outside of the box! So I jammed the box down into the can, wrapped a sheet around it with a bungee cord, and put it in the car. I drove it home, parked the car with the windows cracked, and went to bed.

In the morning, I took a look at the car and saw bees flying in and out. Apparently there was a hole in the bottom of the trashcan and they got out! I put my suit on and drive the car to the back, by the beehives. A beekeeper friend with lots of swarm experience came over to help. He sprayed the inside of the can with sugar water, gave it a good bump, and most of the bees fell into the can. He then dumped this can into the new hive. We did this a couple more times with the can, the swarm trap and the sheet. Quickly, the bees in my car came out and went onto the hive.

Now the swarm from Essie's is snug at home in their new, natural wood colored hive, and I have my "final" number of hives at my home, the South apiary.

Lunchtime bee check!

Cloudy and 62 degrees.

I stopped over to Essie's at lunch today and checked the bees. The sugar syrup on the hive installed yesterday is down about one pint. Tomorrow I will bring a half gallon jar in to have her swap out over the weekend once they get low on syrup. The bees were flying strong.

The swarm trap I put on one of her trees had scout activity. I counted about 10 bees that entered the box in five minutes. It would be really awesome if the bee tree in the back swarmed to this box. I couldn't really tell where the bees were coming from.

A couple cell phone pictures: