Sometimes, it Bees like that

Our day yesterday:

A very eventful afternoon! We headed out about an hour ago to go collect eggs and finish the trellis for the sugar snap peas over here. We have little baby peas growing right now, so hopefully they will be at market soon!! Found where someone had cut our trellis line again this year. Absolutely no doubt it is a person. Yesterday two lines were cut very cleanly in one place. Today, both lines were cut very cleanly in another place. So it is time to get back out there on late night shotgun patrol 

While I was working on fixing the trellis, Jan shrieked from the other end of the row. I looked up to see a big swarm of bees in a ball about 6 feet across where she had been standing a moment ago. They looked stationary, so I figured they would stay put for a minute while I finished fixing the cut trellis, but no, by the time I looked back up they had vamoosed. Spent the next 30 minutes or so trekking around where they had gone, but to no avail. IF ANYONE IN OUR AREA FINDS A SWARM OF BEES, LET US KNOW 

After the search, I headed back to check our hives. Looks like both our colonies are still intact. There are 2 possibilities, either those weren't our bees, and it was someone else's bees, or a wild swarm or, one of our colonies split.

It is a natural part of a bee colonies life cycle to split and swarm every so often. What happens is that the colony feels it is doing well enough to form a second colony. The worker bees will raise a new Queen, and when she is ready, the old queen will leave. The workers split between the old queen and the new queen. Those that chose to go with the old queen will form a swarm outside the hive, usually in a tree. The queen will settle down and all the workers will land on her and form a big mass of bees. Scouts will then head out and look for a new location for the colony. Once they have found one, they come back, tell everyone and they head off en mass to the new location. That is what I think we saw was a swarm heading to a new location.

The bees that choose to stay with the new queen stay in the existing hive. They have the benefit of a known location, all of the food stores that the colony has accumulated and all the eggs and brood (baby bees) that were being raised. The upshot is they loose some numbers of worker bees for a short amount of time, but are fully ready to continue with the brood repopulating the colony numbers back up to a strong level in a short amount of time.

Either way, it doesn't hurt us whether it was our colony that split or another one that was passing through, it was just a missed opportunity to capture them in the swarm stage and install them in a new hive to increase our colony numbers. We do keep a bait hive in our bee yard for such occasions, but, at least in this case, it wasn't what they were looking for 

If you do see a swarm, don't panic. When they are swarming like this they are paying attention to finding a new location, and domestic honey bees are not usually aggressive during a swarm. If you see them in a ball up in a tree or wherever, alert a local bee keeper. If you suddenly find a new colony has moved in someplace on your property either enjoy the bounty or contact a local bee keeper to have them removed.

Colony Collapse, bad news.

Well, we just became part of a national statistic. Last fall, we had a colony of bees that was doing great. I had checked, and they seemed to have a ton of honey stored, so I was fairly confident in their ability to make it through. I planned to put some fondant bee candy to feed them over the winter just to be safe, but I wasn't really all that worried about it. When everything started to happen in the fall, feeding the bees kept getting put off. I fed them in early December, which I though would be plenty early enough, but saw no indication of activity in the hive when I put the fondant in, and I was sure I had put it off to late and lost the hive. I was not a happy camper most of the winter thinking I had killed my colony.

Today, I set out to clean the hive and get it set up for a new colony this year. When I went to pick it up it weighted a ton, which a relatively empty box shouldn't. I popped it apart and discovered a) very few bees at all in the hive and b) almost 8 full frames of honey. There was one small cluster of less than 200 bees in the center, and some of them were head first into empty comb cells like they do when they starve, but less than an inch away the comb was full of honey. Based on plenty of food, and practically no dead bees, I think this is colony collapse disorder. There is no reason for them to have absconded late in the season and abandoned lots of stores, and I am pretty sure the queen was in the little cluster of dead bees that I found. Weird, and frustrating, but at least I feel better that I didn't starve my bees to death...It will be curious to see what happens this year.