Late swarm

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italic63

House Bee
Joined
May 3, 2021
Messages
188
Reaction score
59
Location
Turin, Italy
Hive Type
Dadant
Number of Hives
1
Hello from the north of Italy…
The temperatures here are 15-18 max during the day, 8-10 at night.
The sun has been shining for the last few days and so the bees are out to have a look around. All seemed good.
At the moment however, from one of hives the bees are all out and flying and near the hive with what looks to me like swarm behaviour!
Please see video attached. Could it be too late for a swarm? Should I be worried?
I inspected my 3 hives a couple of weeks ago and they have extremely high levels of honey stores and the queen was still laying albeit to a lesser degree.
Thanks for your help as usual!
View attachment IMG_4646.mov
 
Your video didn't stay on the high point you looked at. Is there an opening they are scouting?
Hi. I thought the same thing but no, there isn’t an opening. They were just hanging around the side of the building. I also noticed them fighting a lot.
Could it be robbing? (As I said before they are stacked full of honey. I’m guessing around 15-20lb of honey each hive). By the way now that the sun has gone down they’ve all gone back in their original hive so I’m guessing not swarming 🤷🏻‍♂️
 
If there's fighting at the entrance then robbing is likely. Close the entrance to allow just 2 or 3 bees to pass and hope for the best (unless you can move them away by 5 kilometers)
 
So after a couple of days of that flight activity in front of the blue hive, today the weather is colder (but normal for this time of the year) and to my dismay I find all the bees from the blue colony dead 😟. The other two seem ok.
No idea what happened. Could it be that something got into the hive that killed them off?
I treated all 3 hives a couple of weeks ago with Api bioxal but 2 seem fine.
Depressed…
 
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