Bees decided not to swarm?

[Beezy]

Hi,
About midday today i looked out the window and saw my bees were about to swarm- there were loads covering the front of the hive and roof. We rushed outside and while my husband made up some new frames for our spare hive to collect them in, i kept an eye on them to see where they were going to fly to. However, the numbers gradually decreased and they seemed to change their minds and go back in the hive??

We had a look inside and it didn't look like they'd swarmed, still heaving with bees. Lots of sealed q cells but i didn't see any unsealed. As we couldn't find the q (she's unmarked and a new one from late last summer) we decided to try again tmrw morning to do an artificial swarm. Hope we can find her. Is it ok to keep 2 q sealed cells as there aren't any unsealed?

Thanks

 

[Tom Bick]

You can only leave the best you have available at the time.

Personally if I had a good sealed QC I would leave that and an open cell.

Remember that the hive may still have eggs in the hive so re check 5 days after your AS for new QC’s.

 

[Beezy]

Ok i'll do that. Thanks tom

 

[Drinkstone]

I thought the existing Q leaves when a Q cell is sealed, also that leaving two sealed cells which we assume hatch means the strongest Q will survive, but that it will be 12 days (?) before the new Q can be ready

 

[Finman]

.
What ever they did, you are in a hury to make AS. Now they will have youg queens .

 

[enrico]

Not sure if they were about to swarm. If the temperature suddenly rises to a good flying temperature they will all emerge at once, especially if it has been cold or wet, they just come out all together and because the entrance gets congested they sit about on the hive and roof. There may be hundreds of bees there for about half an hour or so and then just as quickly it will all die down again. A swarm is a different animal with thousands of flying bees. I wouldn't panic just yet......although of course I could be wrong!
E

 

[Beezy]

hmmm...well at 9.30am this morning they definitely swarmed! they went to a neighbour's garden and hung off their tree. this is our first attempt to collect a swarm and it hasn't gone well so far - we took the majority of bees off and shook them in a spare bb and put it back in our garden...10 minutes later they'd all taken off and gone back to the tree - we'd obviously somehow missed the queen! now they're in a place that's really tricky to get them as we can't fit the bb underneath to shake them in and we also can't chop the branch off as they're hanging off 2 very thick branches.

i've called a local swarm guy as we're at a loss what to do, but i guess he'll want to keep them.

to make matters worse, just looked in the original hive and 2 of the q cells have hatched already, so we could end up with a cast swarm. the word 'clusterf*ck' comes to mind.