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!

Trackback this Post | Feed on comments to this Post