Busy As A Bee

It feels like spring outside and the honeybees are doing their thing - flying around, getting pollen and nectar where they can find it and... getting ready to swarm.  As a result, we'll be going into the hives probably tomorrow, inspecting the frames and (hopefully) making splits BEFORE they swarm.  We have four hives to go through tomorrow.  After dark, I tipped the hives over to see how heavy they were and there is a good population in each hive.  That means the queens are doing a good job.

Why do I say the bees are getting ready to swarm?  Well, the photo below shows the column by our side door.  A number of colonies of bees have made their home in that hollow fiberglass column over the years.  It has to be absolutely full of honeycomb.  Generally, in the summer, the bees leave.  I'm not sure if it gets too hot in there for them or they fill it up and run out of room.  Perhaps it's a combination of the two.

The column has been absent of bees for the past 8 months or so.  This morning, we began to see scout bees checking out the place.  They have been sent by the colony to house hunt.  They went into the open house and (I'm sure) had little tape measures and measured out the square footage and amenities that the column offers.  They'll bring that data back to the hive for a vote, and we'll see if we get a swarm of bees to move back in.  What's that strapped on top of the ladder, you might be asking?

It's a homemade 5 frame nuc swarm trap.  I have it baited with lemongrass oil.  My goal is to tempt some of the scout bees to also look at this as a home to consider moving into.

But I have bad news to report.  The bees are ignoring the nuc.  There is just too much old comb in the column that they can smell.  Bees are opportunistic.  For every comb that they must build from scratch, it equates to less honey.  Bees moving into the column don't really need to make honeycomb.  It's already there.  More and more bees are checking out the column.  I'm certain within a week we'll have a new swarm inhabiting the column.  I've move the nuc swarm trap out into the yard where hopefully we can catch another swarm.

I Built a Little Something For the Bees

There is a lot of trouble to be found out there on the internet.  You don't have to look very far to see things, read things that you wish that you had never seen or read.  Some of it is wickedness.  Some of it is more innocuous, like a song you hear that, like a brain worm, gets stuck in your head and is on a non-stop loop!  Argghh...

But there are other things, specifically on You Tube, that are marvelous.  I recently looked up how to build a nuc.  A "nuc" is a nucleus colony.  It is a small colony used by beekeepers to raise new hives.  The former president of our bee club told us he loves to make splits into nucs.  It is his opinion that bee colonies grow faster in nucs.  He feels that they like to fill small spaces quickly.

After not many clicks, I found plans and was busy with my cut list.  The best part was it was free.  Everything needed to make it I already had on hand from the screws to the 1 x 12 that I had up in the rafters in the barn leftover from a project ten years ago.  I am not a carpenter.  My cuts aren't square.  The finished product is never pretty.  But I've found over the years that the animals don't care, and I don't think the honeybees will care either.  It didn't take long and the nuc was finished.

This is a five frame nuc.

There's the nuc in all her glory, ready for action.

I'm going to pull out two of the frames and use the nuc as a swarm trap.  This is peak swarm season.  I'll show you how I baited it in a couple of minutes.

I set the nuc in the crook of a big live oak tree, facing south and in the shade.

The nuc in the crook of the tree is approximately 30 feet from the colony that is currently living in the hollow fiberglass column you see below.  Every year, the bees fill up the column with comb and then they swarm.  The old queen, with half the hive leave.  This year when it happens, I want to catch them.  That's our goal.

The first thing you want to have in your swarm trap is frames with old drawn comb.  Bees smell it and they feel comfortable where bees used to be.

The second thing you want to use in your swarm trap is an attractant.  We use lemongrass oil.  Bees love it as it resembles the pheromone that the queen puts out.  We put a couple of dashes of lemongrass oil on a cotton ball, put it in a zip loc bag, leaving a crack in the bag.  We put it in the back of the box.  It acts as a slow release attractant.  We also put a couple drops of lemongrass oil at the entrance.

In this photo, you can see the nuc swarm trap in the crook of the tree along with the swarm trap we've baited in the deep box.  We've since moved this swarm trap to the back yard by the four bee boxes.  We watched a swarm leave one of the boxes and they are balled up forty feet up in the branches of the tree.  We put the swarm trap right beneath it.  In no time we had many scout bees checking out both of the swarm traps.

We are hoping to be successful in catching swarms coming off of our hives or catch some wild swarms to bring some new genetics into our hives.  We'll keep you posted if we have some swarms moving in.

Setting Out A Swarm Trap

It was a beautiful spring day today with sunshine and temperatures hitting 71 degrees.  It seemed like a perfect time for honeybees to start swarming, and I didn't want to miss it.  I figured that I would get a swarm trap out.  If one of our hives swarm, I want to catch them before they leave the property.  If I catch a wild swarm, all the better.

I'll show you how we do it.  We've caught three of our four hives in this same location.  It's a "honey hole," one might say.  The first thing you need is some old frames with some drawn out comb on it.  These are some frames from the hive that we lost to wax moths.  I had cleaned them up and now they are ready to use again.

I set a bottom board atop a ladder and stack a deep box on top of it.  That's it.  You can build a special swarm trap, but I've had success just using a regular box with a few frames of drawn comb inside.  The ease comes about when you catch a swarm.  At that point all you have to do is set the box on top of some cinder blocks and you're done.

The next thing you need is an attractant.  You can use a product called Swarm Commander, but we simply us some Lemongrass Oil.  It mimics the pheremone that the queen puts out.

I'll put a couple of drops of lemongrass oil on a cotton ball.

And I'll drop it in the very back of the bee box with the frames in it.

Then I put the cover on and use a ratchet strap to secure the swarm trap to the ladder.  I don't want any winds to knock it down.

And now, we wait.  Hopefully, scout bees will search and find the box and, like an open house at a realtor's showing, the bees will tour around and decide that this would be a good "fixer upper" and move in.  We're hoping that's the case, and that they'll hang a "Home Sweet Home" sign out front.  We'll keep you posted with our progress in catching a swarm.

Caught Another Swarm!

After we had no success with the swarm trap attracting the scout bees that eventually brought over a swarm that located into our column on the side porch, I moved the swarm trap back to where we had caught a swarm last year.  It seems to be the 'sweet spot' (pardon the pun) for catching swarms.  It's between the navel orange tree and the garden.  It's right near the water trough and garden.  

It's not really an official swarm trap.  It's merely a normal deep box with five frames of foundation in it, one of which has old drawn out comb.  To the back of the box, I dropped a cotton ball that I had dropped two drops of lemongrass essential oil on.  Lemongrass oil mimics the pheromone that the queen bee gives off and attracts the bees.  The very next day, we had scout bees checking the place out!

Can you see them flying in?

They kept coming and coming.  It wasn't a huge swarm, but it qualified as a box of bees in my book.  I took the top off and peered inside.  I was pretty confident the queen was in there, although I couldn't find her.

They are fun creatures to watch.  You immediately understand how the term "as busy as a bee" came about.  These bees are doing some housecleaning.   They are primarily on the old frame and are cleaning the comb.  Once they get it clean, the bees will start building out more comb.

In a day or two, the queen will be all ready to begin laying eggs.  The aptly named worker bees are getting the work done.

I waited until night time and shined a light in the box.  It was full of bees, so I moved the box off of the ladder and sat it on top of some cinder blocks near our other two boxes of bees.  I got a queen excluder and put it on the bottom, right above the bottom board.  The queen excluder keeps the queen from flying off.  It will allow the other bees to come and go, but is a little too small to allow the queen to fit though.

You can see all the bees lining the entrances of the (now) three hives.  Here's the plan.  I'll check the new box for eggs in two days and see if I can locate any eggs.  Once there are eggs, the queen will, in all likelihood not leave, so once I see eggs, I'll remove the queen excluder.

On Saturday I opened the new box and spotted eggs.  We have a laying queen!  Guess what we did?  We set the swarm trap out again!

Putting Together Frames For the Bees

Here's a look at one of the two bee hives that we have on the property.  It's been about a year since we caught two swarms - one in Jefferson Davis Parish and one out at the farm in Allen Parish.  I took this video, but wish I would've gotten film of the bees' activity today.  The video below is really tame compared to all the bees this afternoon.

We plan on expanding in the bee business this year.  We'd like to put out some additional swarm traps to see if we could be successful in catching more that way.  Primarily, though, we'd like to expand by making splits.  If your hive is healthy enough, you can make a split by taking a frame of eggs/larvae, a frame of honey and pollen and plenty of nurse bees from the existing hive and placing them in the center of another box surrounded by frames.

What happens is remarkable.  The bees immediately know that there is no queen.  They begin "making" a queen.  (You can also purchase a queen cell to speed things up.)  The queen will hatch, make her virgin flight, be bred by drones and return to the "new" box and begin laying eggs.  This will be a first for us.  We'll see if we're successful.

First, we need more equipment:  boxes, frames, bottom boards and tops.  Russ has a friend in a nearby town that had some new frames for sale.  We drove over last weekend and picked them up.  They came in pieces, requiring assembly.

I got some wood glue and put the frames together.  Once the glue had dried, Tricia began popping the foundation in place.  The foundation is coated with beeswax.

In a jiffy we had the 20 deep frames put together.  On Thursday afternoon, we'll head to Lacassine to purchase some boxes, bottom boards, and tops from a gentleman in our beekeeping club.  Then we'll be ready to go - either put up swarm traps OR make splits.  Our beekeeping club will be making splits in early March, so we'll try to glean as much knowledge as we can.

The Swarm Trap

We've caught two separate swarms of honeybees in the backyard.  We are novice beekeepers.  I guarantee you we will mess this up, but that doesn't stop us from trying and learning.  One of the swarms appears to be healthy, while the other is not.  In fact, we've lost hive 2.  Tricia thinks we accidentally injured/killed the queen.  Maybe I'll report on that later.

We are putting out another swarm trap out to try to catch another swarm or two.  We live in prime honeybee area.  The nation's fifth largest honeybee producer lives less than a mile from us.  As a result there are lots of bees in the area.  While we haven't had tremendous success in KEEPING bees, we've been blessed to catch two swarms in less than 3 weeks.  We're trying again.

Here's how we do it.  It starts out with an attractant.  We use lemongrass essential oil.  There is another product called Swarm Commander.  Either attractant is a pheromone that attempts to mimic the scent that scout bees emit when they've found a place that they want the colony to locate to as their new home.  Swarm Commander is 3 times the cost of lemongrass essential oil, so we opt for the economy product.

We put three drops on a cotton ball.  We've been told to be careful with this as the worker bees like the scent, but if you put too much, the queen doesn't like it.  Since the object is to get the queen in the box, you want to have the right amount.  It's trial and error.  We've learned that every beekeeper has their own method for doing things, so you have to try things out to see what works best for you.

Our swarm trap is a 'deep box' on top of a bottom board, with a top board and a telescoping cover.  We drop the lemongrass oil infused cotton ball in the trap next to a frame of drawn out comb.

I put the trap on top of a six foot ladder and use a ratchet strap to tie it down.

And now, we just wait and check it every day.

Hopefully, we'll have some scout bees come check out the box and will want to move in.  We will simply wait and check it every day.  We'll let you know and post if we catch another swarm.