Earlier this year, a friend Laura, my husband and I got a bee in our collective bonnet, so to speak. We decided we should become beekeepers. So we took a class. And we learned a lot. And we ordered some bees. And then we put them in the hive.
We were thoroughly enamored with our small friends and for quite awhile they seemed to be happy. They seemed to doing everything exactly as they should be. They were growing cheerfully, we kept finding more eggs and larvae and honey. Everything looked like it should. So we gave them some more room. And then we gave them a honey super (a handy little box, smaller than the others, where bees can store honey, and beekeepers can later harvest it). I have to say at that point, I could almost taste the honey.
Sometime around that time, our hive swarmed. We didn’t see the swarm, and we didn’t realize it had happened until we took a peek in the hive. And it looked suspiciously empty. Laura wrote about that here and she has some excellent photos of the bees.
After a lot of discussion, and a lot of help from Jim at Beez Neez we decided out best course of action was to split up the hive. Our original hive had no queen that we could find, but it did have plenty of queen cells. So we knew that our hive was trying to raise a new queen. That, however, can be a tricky business, and it’s not always successful in the coolish temperatures of Washington.
So, we picked up a new queen, of the delightfully-named Old Soul variety. And then the weather refused to cooperate. It was windy. It was cold. Our very special bug lived for several days in Laura’s pantry. In the meantime, the newbie beekeepers worried and wondered if we’d ever get her in the hive.
Finally, on Friday, the weather behaved and we split our hives. We gave the queen her own box and left the original hive with their own box, and some queen cells. Maybe they would end up with a real queen, maybe they wouldn’t. If they did, great, we’d get two hives. If not, no problem, we had our Old Soul queen to get things going. We congratulated ourselves on a successful operation and hoped for the best.
And then Laura called me on Monday. The original hive had swarmed again. Bother. Laura fearlessly went out and collected the swarm. (I was at home sick, and am kinda bummed I missed seeing the swarm.)
People speak of bees swarms with fear, but in fact a swarm of honey bees is really mellow. Laura assured me that all we heard about mellow swarms was actually true. They have nothing to defend, so placing them in a nice cozy box wasn’t too complicated.
For those of you who are counting, that means we had three hives. A lot for some newbie beekeepers.
And then the hive swarmed again. And again. And again. All in one day. Laura caught three small swarms on Tuesday. She had to be rather resourceful and creative to make temporary home for all the bees. Jim at Beez Neez was really awesome, and helped us get the equipment we needed on very short notice. He even lent us some stuff to get us through. Ultimately, one of those swarms either flew off, or joined with another.
Now, for those of you who are counting, that leaves us with five hives.
So. That’s were the bee saga is now. We will watch for the Old Soul or our original hive to have new eggs or larvae. And then we will probably combine some of the hives. The swarms are too small to make it on their own through a winter, so combining them should hopefully help our bees build a strong hive.
Stand by. There will certainly be more stories to come as the bees constantly teach us new things.
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