One of my honey bee colonies swarmed into a tree last week. I caught it and put it in a new hive with a small frame feeder and three frames of empty drawn comb so the queen could start laying right away. I checked on it yesterday and here’s a video that shows what I found (it’s doing well):
It’s not the greatest video, but it shows how things are working out for me since I moved the hives from my backyard to a place in the country. I won’t say exactly where I moved the hives, but anyone familiar with farms around St. John’s probably won’t have a hard time guessing correctly.
A couple notes about the video: 1) I got lazy with making my improvised ventilated inner covers. I came up with an equally effective but much easier to make version of the same thing at the 3:19 mark in the video. I haven’t tested it much yet, but I’ll write up a more detailed post for it later if it works. 2) The hived swarm probably doesn’t need two deeps just yet (and probably doesn’t need the extra ventilation), but swarms are known for building up fast. I gave them the extra hive box in case I can’t make it out next week. I’ll keep feeding the hive now just like I would with a nuc.
Continued on with Queen in a Hived Swarm.
Very professionally shot video, love your commentary. Looks like you can really spread out more in the new location.
You might want to watch out that having the top entrance above the queen excluder doesn’t encourage robbing whilst the swarm’s still building up.
“You might want to watch out that having the top entrance above the queen excluder doesn’t encourage robbing whilst the swarm’s still building up.”
I agree. We forgot to bring an inner cover and improvised with the queen excluder on top. We’ll add a solid inner cover next weekend and hope for the best.
Ah, I see! Lovely to see your bees doing so well.
Glad to see you haven’t given up on foundationless. One thing, if you’re using drawn comb in a new hive, you might want to use brood comb, not drone comb. Otherwise, you’ll get more drones. I remember you posting that too many drones was a problem in your first foundationless hive.
if using foundationless first. WHen it comes to a split the first 7 frames should be mostly worker comb, there after foundationless will incoperate drone into new comb. So if you plan to continue foundatinless after the first 7 frames start adding frames with plastic foundation or continue to limit the number of bees/ worker frames present so they continue to pull more worker frames…. So I read.
To say I haven’t given up on foundationless isn’t exactly the case. I have a foundationless hive and I’m stuck with it. That’s all. Whenever I have to replace any of the frames in the hive, I put in conventional frames with foundation. I’ve replaced several frames so far. I’ve used the old foundationless frames for swarm traps as drawn comb for the caught swarm.