The tractor that I use to mow our lawn has been broken down for the past few weeks so the grass in our yard has gotten out of hand. This fox appeared a couple of evenings this week hunting voles in the backyard.
He spent quite a while searching around.
Here you can see the long fluffy tail.
I went to check my bees today for what I thought would be a quick routine inspection. As I approached the hives I heard loud buzzing and realized it wasn't coming from the hive boxes. I saw a large cloud of bees buzzing around a bush about 30 feet from the hives and then saw the large ball of bees hanging on a branch about seven feet up.
I think that they had swarmed out of my strong hive just minutes before I found them. When I first saw them there were a lot of airborne bees but after I left to get a new hive box and came back five minutes later, there were far fewer bees in the air and they were almost all in this large ball. I put the hive box under the ball as best I could and wanted to cut the branch with one hand and hold the swarm with the other, but the branch was too thick to cut with one hand. I tried to cut it part way with large clippers, but it broke off in the process and fell, dumping the bees half in the hive box and half on the ground.
I put some frames with foundation in the box hoping the smell of beeswax would help draw them in. I noticed that the bees on the ground were moving into the box so I just left them alone for a while.
Here the bees are moving into and onto the box from the ground. There are bees on the hive entrance fanning their wings to spread enticing pheromones to attract the other bees in.
This frame is from the hive I split off two weeks ago, this being the box that did not get the queen. The large open cell near the top right of the frame as I hold it here is, I hope, an open queen cell. I looked for a queen but didn't see here, but, then, I almost never am able to find the queen when I look for her.
This is a frame from the other hive that had the queen, though this is surely the hive that swarmed taking the old queen away. This is a frame that appears to be new brood comb by its light tan color, surrounded by capped honey cells.
This by contrast is old her brood comb that is somewhat darker. You can see the drone brood -- the extended cells along the top of hte frame here. I did see several drones while I was going through this hive.
There are several queen cells hanging off of the bottom of this frame of capped brood, pollen and honey. The queen cells are the peanut shaped cells on the bottom of the frame. This hive had several frames with multiple queen cells so is well equipped to replace the queen that left. In fact, I took one of those frames and put it in one of my new "nuc" boxes to make a small hive to raise a queen in case the other hive doesn't have one.
This is uncapped larva surrounded by capped honey in the same hive.
This my new hive configuration after the days work was done. I've gone from one hive two weeks ago to three full size hives and a nuc, though of course all of the full size hives are somewhat weak, with the two at the left without confirmed or laying queens currently. The "nuc" or nucleus hive, is the small unpainted box in the middle. The hive that had swarmed is in the box on the right. They all entered the hive while I was working on the other hives, and seemed to have quieted down nicely. I certainly hope that they say. I put feeders on the two split hives without queens as they seemed the two weakest of the the three.
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