The swarm that absconded yesterday from the hive I put them in finally chose the hive again as home. Sometime around 1 pm they landed back in it. This proves the concept to me of using a bait hive to bring down swarms high up in trees. I kind of think of it as fishing.
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Also, I presented a lecture on Swarm Traps to my local bee club. I think it went well. I strongly believe every beekeeper should have at least 2 traps deployed during spring.
Two swarm calls today. One was from a fellow in Leander who called 911 and they gave him my phone number. Simply 3# of bees under a trampline. Due to the travel time I opted for the “Grab and Go” method, put a box underneath, shake the swarm, wait 20 minutes to settle and take what I have. Yea, I miss a hundred foragers or so, but I wasn’t going to drive another hour for them.
The second swarm was near me on a trash can lid 10 minutes away, I shook them into my hive and left. When I returned at dusk for them, they had absconded 30 feet away in the top of a nearby tree. Damn. So I put a drop of lemongrass oil in the hive and left the hive body as a bait hive. I’ll come back in a few days to see what happened.
Swarm, swarms, swarms! Looks like the girls are trying to make up for last year. I’ve been out of town at a convention and had to turn down 3 swarm calls last week! I took another call yesterday and bagged another swarm. Unfortunately, I made a minor error that led to them absconding.
Swarms as a rule, have a tendency to sometimes not take to the hive box you put them in and they abscond. You can reduce this risk by:
1. Applying a couple of drops of Lemon Grass oil in the hive before you put them in it.
2. Plug up the hive entrances with grass for a day or two. The grass keeps them in, and if you forget, they can chew their way out. It also forces them to stay in the hive and that decreases the absconding probability by quite a bit.
My mistake was plugging the entrances with paper and not grass. The rain made the paper wet and they got out within 12 hours and absconded. At least I got $50 to pick up the hive, so that covers gas money.
Also rendered a new video on a beekeeping adventure in West Texas. I’ll upload tonight.
Hive count: 7
Just updated a little more and added a new video on transferring comb.
I’m really, really, busy this spring. Not much time to update the website, so I’ll try to add a little each week.
I’ve got 7 hives running right now — 2 survivors from last year, 2 cutouts from this year, 3 captured swarms. I’ve just had a package of bees show up today that I”ll install at my friends estate who wants some local honey. They’ll be installed on mediums because I’m running out of deeps.
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Also, I added an article on hive density.
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I’ve been overdue for having my own beekeeping website. My goal is to pack lots of knowledge into small easy-to-digest videos for the average learning beekeeper.
Many of my video segments are on youtube, but YT is not good quality renders, and a poor player as well. So I’m trying to get all of
