Started the day at 9am, loading the bee van with nucs and mini mating nucs. Went to a yard with Scott Nelson of Nelson Family Honey and there were 3 swarms. We hived them and went through the others and pulled out queen cells and shook bees into mini mating nucs. I came home with 11 queen cells. Some were starting to hatch!!! I watched other queens hatch today. Very cool. I got a call from the JC and there were 2 swarms. I told them I would be there before 4pm. Left Scott and Rose and went to the JC. There was another swarm in the exact location we got the last one on the tree. I hope that I will be able to look at the original one on Sunday. See how they are doing! The second swarm had taken off and all that was left was the few foragers that came back. From there I went to the Montgomery/mission area and looked at a guy’s bee problem. Wall extraction, 2nd story job…refer to Glenn Murphy.

Tell the guy in the next 2 1/2 weeks, Glenn will get to it. Tell him to vacuum the dozen bees in the house. Then on to Rohnert Park where the guy tells me that the swarm is the size of a grapefruit. Turns out he’s petrified of the bees and really hasn’t investigated the cluster. 10 pounds of bees. Hahaha. Go back and pick up bees at dusk. Come home, hive bees and eat dinner at 9:30p. Better get to bed soon. Meeting Scott at office tomorrow at 9am to super hives and cull swarm queens all day…. unless I get a swarm call. LOL!

My first swarm was January 23rd from one of my hives. Since then I have taken 3 swarms from Oak Trees at the Santa Rosa Junior College. I have had swarm calls there in previous years, when I get a swarm from the same bush! I have taken some bees out of a trailer which was filled with garbage. The bees were in a couch, which had had bees in it for 3 years. Our weather has been unusually rainy and the bees use just a break in the rain to swarm. I got a 15 pound swarm and a 4 pound swarm in an apple orchard after they had been there for 4 days. These issued from another beeks hives. He called me to collect them as he was moving bees from the almonds to the oranges. I got some wet bees (3 days) on the overhang of a barn. Another beekeeper called me to get these bees. They always have swarms from the old oak trees, where there are 4 feral nests. Those bees decided to attack me, when I was brushing them into the lid of a swarm box. I had the swarm box balanced between the ladder and my knees, so I had to get it, and the lid and walk down the ladder and place the bees on the ground. Full venom load. Whew! About 30 hits to the face and scalp. I was a puffy gal. LOL But, I got the queen!

Today my Chihuahuas woke me up barking. There had to be either a critter outside or a human had come calling fairly early in the day. Definitely a critter. Several critters. Wild turkeys!!! The meadows are tall with wildflowers blooming everywhere and the apple trees in the 16 acres that surround us are all blooming. Bee heaven, almost. Almost, because it was very cold and damp out and the forecast was for a high of 54 degrees and rain at 50%. Now that is not good for the bees. They will fly at 54, but they get caught in a rainstorm and they are wet, cold and dead in an instant. I was ready to go work the apiaries, but this did not look like a promising day for the bees. At 11:00 am I got a call from a lady in Windsor. Bees had been in her redwood tree about 20 feet up for 3 days. Tomorrow is Easter, and she’s having the kids and grand kids for the day and an Easter egg hunt. The bees could get in the way of family fun, so she wanted me to remove them.

Now, most times a swarm is gentle and easy. It is one of the safest times to be around that many honeybees. You see, they eat up as much honey as their honey stomachs can hold and leave with the old queen. First of all, they are full. Second of all, they cannot bend their abdomen down to puncture the skin with a sting barb and venom sack. Well, these bees were hanging in this tree for 3 days and they were hungry and mad! I put on my veil, which I don’t have to wear around MY bees. My bees have been bred for gentleness for 3 years. The bees in the swarm started pinging my veil. Pinging is when they bounce off your head. It is like a sign to “go away!” I trimmed a Cecil Brunner climbing rose that had become wound through a small redwood tree. The bees were on an intersection of rose branches and redwood branches 20 feet up. I trimmed everything back, but it was still very congested. I took the swarm nuc box up my ladder and began to spray the bees with some sugar water with peppermint leaves. This is sugar water, which is like nectar and the bees can eat it up (fill that stomach so you can’t sting me). And, they are wet and can’t fly well, so I can shake them into the box and they will stay in it while I climb back down the ladder with 4 pounds of bees. That’s the way it is supposed to work. Ha! A guy on a bee list I belong to has a signature line that reads: His Name, “Bees work according to rules, but not always.” This was one of those non rules kind of days.

About a dozen stings later, I got the pole bucket and left the swarm box on the ground with the first pound of bees that I had gotten to drop in the swarm nuc box. I put the bucket up under the first of three bunches of bees (they had shuffled position with the first shake). A sharp bump on the branch in an upward position and they drop into the bucket…a pound and a half of bees, at least. But, half the ones in the box had flown back up to the tree, while I got the first bucket of bees down. Okay, I tell myself, “you didn’t get the queen.” So, I give them a minute to calm down and cluster again, and I decide to do one bump under all three bunches and then drop the bucket to the swarm box. This time, I poured the bees out in front of the box and watched them walk in.

I was looking for the queen. I didn’t see her, but the bees started fanning. Fanning is when the bees fan their wings and the last segment of their abdomen is tipped down, exposing a gland called the Nasanov gland. This is a scenting gland that tells the other bees to “come here.” Now, that can be “come here” ~this is where we all are now or “come here” ~and sting the place I just stung. In this case, it was “come here” ~the queen is here! The rest of the bees flew down to the box in just about 15 minutes. While I waited, I had a cup of green tea with the nice lady named Joanne, who had watched bravely as I got the bees. She was wearing black and the bees think black=bear. So, they started pinging her. I moved away, because I had received about 15 “come heres,” and I was attracting them! Happy Easter! Happy Passover!

It’s been a while since I have had time to write. Why? Bees, of course! I’ll tell you about one of the days since then. My 58th birthday was APRIL 26TH.. Frank asked me how I wanted to spend my day. I said, I don’t want to feed bees, write about bees, inspect bees, move bees or dump bees. I just want to CHASE bees. So, I packed up the van and went on my first swarm call. Bees are in trees. Bees were on the ground. Bees are in a bush. Bees are in two places on one call. The end of a very long day is near, but I still have one call left. Bees were in a hot tub. This is technically NOT a swarm, but it is an extraction. I have to take apart a hole in the deck that allows me to crawl low enough to get the screws out, so that I could take the panel off and expose the bees. I set up my vacuum and felt for the feel of ‘barely sucking’, and began to vacuum the bees I could see. This was very difficult to do. Due to the fact that hot tubs, under all the pretty parts are a maze of pipes, insulation and wires and not enough space for the vacuum to reach. I worked at it for several hours and felt that I had to stop, because of the darkness that was falling. I felt that I had most probably gotten the queen in my special bee vacuum box that a friend had made me and taught me how to use it and not kill the bees. (Which is why I had never used one until now.) I left the homeowner with instructions to give me a few days to get the bees settled and see if we have the queen.

I explained that there were a few escapees that would still hang around, but that the number of them should decrease if we have the queen in my box. Oh, and you thought I was done. Not so fast. There are still all of the 5 swarm boxes that I have to go back and pick up, now that it is colder and all the forager bees have returned to their new, temporary home. I came home one tired, sore, exhausted, fulfilled, birthday girl. BTW, I got the hot tub queen!!! I named the colony Hotty.

The Sonoma County Beekeeper’s Association’s board meeting just ended and I decided to write even though it is almost midnight, because a very exciting thing came to a conclusion today. A couple of months ago I had an email from a girl named Juliana on the sonomabees list on Yahoo! She spoke of a tree that had bees in it for 16 years at the Children’s Center at the College of Marin. The tree sent up three trunks and one had been cut off a while back. The opposite side was rotting and leaning over the kids’ playground, so it had to go. The folks who had the authority had hired a tree cutting service and they wanted me to do an extraction of the bees, before they removed the tree.

We negotiated back and forth and I was given permission to try to save some bees. So, first I vacuumed the bees that were coming out of the hole in the tree. I did this for 3 hours. The next day the tree was cut down and I came back and dug the sawdust out of the beehive and then vacuumed more bees as I removed comb by comb as far down as my hive tool would reach. Then a cone was placed over the hole that the bees used to exit the hive. Now they could only exit one by one. I placed a trap hive on the old stump with brood of all ages and nurse bees. The way this is supposed to work is the bees are getting colder as the day wears on and when they can’t wait any longer, they go into to the trap hive and cluster.

Eventually you get the majority of the foragers, and all the new foragers that were nurse bees at the beginning of the project. BUT, some of the college folks decided to keep the stump and have it moved to a horticultural area, so they wanted to have the trap hive and cone removed, so that was done. I later got a call that they decided it was too costly and idea and they wanted me, again, to remove the bees.

In all of these frustrating trips to Marin, I met a whole group of really, sincerely interested people. Interested in Bees, that is. Not only were they mad that a tree had to go, they didn’t want to lose the bees that had lived there for so long. I promised to give a good home to the transplants and there was nothing that could be done for the tree. I cut out comb filled with honey and all the passersby got to taste from ‘their’ tree. The next visit I removed all of the wax comb up to my armpit after the guys made another cut. There were lots of drones and I had not found any brood or eggs or larvae. There was talk of swarms in the last week. I kept finding swarm cells in the comb I was removing, so this was evident. I was wondering if, with all the drones I saw that maybe a laying worker had developed ovaries and started laying, but they hadn’t been without a queen long enough.

When the tree trunk was finally hauled away (BTW, it was very rotten and the bees had been able to travel freely between two of the trunks.) I left a big trap hive, where I had rubber banded on some of the comb from the original hive. I knew this hive interruption had a lot of bees circling in the air, trying to find out where their home went. I took the vacuumed bees and comb home and left the trap hive. I picked it up two days later and brought it home and sat it perpendicular, landing board to landing board at a 45 degree angle. The next day, I noticed bees moving from the small nuc to the regular box, the trap hive.

Today, I opened them both up. There were bees in the trap box hive, but no bees left in the little nuc. The trap box hive looked amazingly content. Strange, for a hive with no queen. I picked up the next to the middle frame after carefully separating each frame and low and behold they have a new queen in their midst. This was a hallelujah moment. Night, ya’ll.

O.K….
So here I was at Kathy’s house. We’re just talking about bees, of course, and all of a sudden I look up and there is this HUGE swarm of bees in her backyard, I pointed at it for her to look and she screams “FRANK We have a swarm”. It was sooooo exciting for me, that I had to tell everyone. It was from her bee tree trunk. Anyway, they landed in the next door neighbors cypress, but really high. I think Kathy said there was about 15lbs. of bees. It was wonderful. Glenn stopped by to launch a weighted rope to shake the high branch and hopefully drop the bees lower, where we could get them on a tall ladder. We took a pole with a bucket at the end (just long enough), got up on the ladder and shook those girls…Bucket after bucket after bucket of bees, It seemed they would never end. They are all now safe in their new home. These are very special bees to Kathy, but you will have to ask her about them…something about genetics!!!

Anyway, I didn’t have my camera, but I think this was the most exciting bee adventure (considering I’ve only had one before) I’ve ever had. Maybe the pictures Kathy took will come out. They were pretty high in the tree.

I can’t wait for my next swarm catching.I guess I need to get on the swarm list as soon as I get more experience..

Thanks for listening about my exciting day.
Ann Akers

I have been working with a fellow who does wall extractions. I am at his call and I bucket up and down his supplies, wash his rags and generally do gofer work. I’ve promised him queen bees for life and he gives me the feral genetics! I have 2 hives that had been in the same walls for 16 years. One was right over the old fellow’s window and he loved these bees, but new neighbors, new house changed all that. Another extraction we did, the tenants of the 4 plex talk of ours being the fourth time they have gotten comb honey from the bees in 10 years. I have some bees from a stump that had been there for 16 years.

It was in front of a children’s school at the College of Marin, where people talk of the swarms they have seen issue. And last week we took out a colony that had been in a roof in a mansion for 40 years. All the “kids” talk about “the bees.” In my own yard, I have bees who have lived in a tree for 9 years. They were in the whole tree for at least 6 years and I have had the chunk of tree for 3 years. Bees that survive without intervention by man…………ahhhhh. They have a natural resistance to the mites that are killing the honeybee.