A mate got a telephone message yesterday morning from the chap who owns the land his bees are on; the message advised him to take a look at his hives. Worried that they had been poisoned we went to have a look at them last night. A week or so ago he had remarked that the bees were not flying as vigorously as they had been about 3-4 weeks ago and I had asked him did he think they had swarmed... We left it that he was going to do a full inspection on the first good day. After getting the telephone message he decided the inspection couldn’t wait any longer and he asked me to help go through his two hives last night.
The weather wasn't ideal and as soon as we opened the first hive we had angry bees on the go. He runs commercials and the brood box was full of bees. Frame one was full of stores, frame two a mix of stores, nectar and emerging brood. As my mate was doing the manipulation I asked him to look for eggs and larvae; none present… The first thing we both saw on frame three were several nice big capped queen cells. Frames three through eight all had capped queen cells on. Since there were no eggs or larvae present and considering their lesser activity over the past few weeks, we concluded the colony had swarmed, possibly eight days ago and may have issued a cast… We decided to split the colony to get a little increase and went back through the frames to select the queen cells we would leave in each hive. As we did that we noticed that queens had emerged from a couple of the cells as little caps were dangling from the cell bottoms. The queens may actually have emerged as we were going through the hive. I suspect that the colony could have been keeping some of these Queens shut up in their cells waiting for better weather to allow them to issue a cast but that the distraction of the inspection allowed the virgin queens to get out….. As we went back through the frames making the split it was obvious that a number of the queen cells were vacant and this had not been obvious on the first run through the brood box. Anyway, the colony was split and “excess” queen cells removed. On checking the other colony of bees it was obvious they too had swarmed. Rather than splitting it, we just left it with a couple of nice big queen cells.
As the queen cells were removed from the frames, I dropped a couple into my pocket thinking to keep them warm and that I could call with another friend on the way home and borrow an apidea…. I didn’t get quite that far. Let me explain. My full bee suit was in the wash so I was wearing a light observer smock. Knowing that I have been stung through the hat of the smock and through the arms on a few occasions I took a few precautions: baseball cap on and boiler suit worn under the smock. It wasn’t quite enough.
Remember the queen cells that I dropped into my pocket? Well, once I had dropped them into my pocket I pulled the smock back down over the pocket and went about my business. Recently someone posted about opening a queen cell to find a dead worker sealed in it: I spotted the same thing last night and on examination it was obvious that the queen cell had been re-sealed. I also encountered live workers in recently vacated queen cells. Clearly they were taking advantage of a meal of royal jelly! By this stage some of you may be getting ahead of my narrative.
As we were working on the second hive I felt something at the back of my neck and since it had started to rain and we were under trees, I disregarded the feeling. That was a mistake. A couple of minutes later I was stung on the side of my neck. My second sting of the evening – the first was on my jaw line and received when I was lifting a crown board off the ground and my veil folded up against my jaw and allowed a bee to sting through the veil. For a while I thought I was the second person I know to have been stung by a queen – I thought she had emerged in my pocket, crawled up under the smock and stung me. The reality was a bit more mundane. When I finally got a chance to remove the smock, there were barbs and poison sacks attached to both spots where I was stung so clearly I had been stung by workers. A worker must have gone into the queen cell for a feed prior to me pocketing it and then ‘emerged’ inside my pocket only to climb up and sting me on the neck. C’est la vie!
Lessons learned? Well, I now plan to buy a second ‘spare’ bee suit and my mate has learned the hard way that you do need to carry out regular full inspections to try to manage swarming. The whole scenario is a great example of one of the precursors to swarming – a decline in activity around the hive. With the benefit of hindsight, the decline in activity corresponds with the point in time when the bees could have first swarmed.
Keep an eye on your hives folks and learn to interpret what you see, hear and smell, even before you open the hive.
