mystil
House Bee
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2011
- Messages
- 156
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Somerset
- Hive Type
- National
- Number of Hives
- 3
Hello Peeps
Does anyone know of a good example of a video of a mating flight? or can discribe what it looks like? does it look like a swarm or do you see nothing?
Also
Had another swarm yesturday but they dissappeared (we caught them in a box but they vanished and it was only in next doors garden). We thought they may have come back to the hive until we saw an open queen cell. Would they come back?
We killed a new emerging queen and found another open queen cell which a queen had emerged from, we think (did not see her).
So we can assume that the queen from the open cell is still in the hive?
We throughly checked the frames for more QC and found no more, so hopefully we will not have any more swarms although our bees are very good at concealment of QC's!
Good news is that the original prime swarm queen is laying strong and we have her as a back up if anything goes completely wrong.
Does anyone know of a good example of a video of a mating flight? or can discribe what it looks like? does it look like a swarm or do you see nothing?
Also
Had another swarm yesturday but they dissappeared (we caught them in a box but they vanished and it was only in next doors garden). We thought they may have come back to the hive until we saw an open queen cell. Would they come back?
We killed a new emerging queen and found another open queen cell which a queen had emerged from, we think (did not see her).
So we can assume that the queen from the open cell is still in the hive?
We throughly checked the frames for more QC and found no more, so hopefully we will not have any more swarms although our bees are very good at concealment of QC's!
Good news is that the original prime swarm queen is laying strong and we have her as a back up if anything goes completely wrong.
). The mechanics of the flight/mating etc is interesting - but similar to the OP we had what appeared to be a swarm from one of our hives described to us by an innocent bystander (startled too) but then we found no QCs on inspection and a very healthy number of bees....... we wondered if to an inexperienced eye a mating flight would be substantial enough to be misdiagnosed as a swarm?
