You will recall that at the end of March, I was turning down swarm calls because I had no equipment to spare. What I didn’t know at the time was that a cold and windy spell that hit right after the March swarm burst meant that parent colonies were unable to requeen themselves, so when I checked in on the colonies a few weeks later, some colonies were hopelessly queenless. I combined these queenless colonies with queenright ones, in the process freeing up some equipment.
This turned out to be a good thing, as I got call in mid-April for what tuned out to be one of the biggest swarms I have seen in a long time. This particular swarm had bivouacked on a trailer hitch in a truck dealer’s parking lot. I couldn’t get my catch box completely under the swarm, but I did get enough of the swarm into the box that the rest readily went into the box. The picture shows the scene; and it was much appreciated by all the dealership employees.
About an hour after the picture was taken, the swarm was all in the box, and I took it away to its new home. Since then, the swarm has developed nicely into a new colony. The bees have been docile, and the queen has been marked.
I had supered my production colonies thinking swarming was over, however one had other ideas and apparently swarmed one day while I was out (the tipoff was a drastic reduction on colony population). A weak colony is a hive beetle’s dream come true. I combined the now-weak colony with a nuc to give a quick bee population boost, and was treated to the sad scene of all the old nuc’s field force coming back to the old nuc site and finding nothing.
I am a softie. Rather than let the field bees fly around to no purpose and eventually die, I retrieved two frames of eggs and brood from the colony (those frames were originally in the nuc), added three empty drawn comb frames, and put them all out in a nuc box at the old nuc location. The nuc’s old field bees now had someplace to go, and a later inspection found the bees in the new nuc were raising new queens. In a few weeks, I’ll have a fully functional replacement nuc.
What is my management take-away for the month? A few strong colonies are better than many weak ones. If you have weak colonies, combine them, add a nuc, and in general do what it takes to get all your colonies up to strength.
As for our main nectar flow, it is on, but so far, the results have been disappointing. A combination of drought, windy conditions, and a late March freeze wiped out many of the blooms for the early part of the nectar flow. However, our normal nectar flow time still has a month or so to go, so we’ll see what happens.
And that’s the news for early May.
-Bill Miller