I was rung on Christmas Eve about a small swarm at a property about 10 mins away, on the edge of the city - did I want it ??? I had my TB hive all ready to put bees into, cleaned out the ants and let the sunshine in to air it all out - you bet I wanted them !!Once again, the swarm had landed right at eye level and were very easy to capture. This time I used a large drawstring bag that air could circulate through but bees couldn`t get out, put the bag`s wide mouth under the bottom of the swarm, pulled the bag up to enclose all the bees and shook the small tree hard - with that, most of the bees fell into the bag, I pulled the drawstring closed, after waiting for the few hanger-ons to re-group, shook them in and away we went.
Bees busily fanning at the entrance of the TB hive, alerting all the others still in the bag, to get in here - quick ! I have used the solid partition board to halve the space in the hive for this swarm, as they increase i will add more space and also beable to close it down over the colder months. It was simple to pour the bees into the hive, interesting enough, most of the bees seemed happy to stay where they landed with not many flying up and around.
I am very happy to have bees in my TB again, I was so dissapointed about the spraying incident and my neighbour has promised he won`t spray anything again,hopefully, he has learnt a good lesson. I am going to write about TB hives into my teaching material for next year if I teach again (depends on Govt funding) during the school terms. I really hope so, I did enjoy spreading the beekeeping word.
6 comments:
Yay! I'm sooooo glad you got a swarm:)
Very nice! It is cold and wintry here, but I hope this coming year I'll be lucky enough to find a swarm as nice as that one. I am ordering a spare hive to have on hand just in case (I received my six shallow supers with frames on Wednesday). Santa came one day early! :) Happy holidays! Mark
I am so very happy for you. That is a beautiful little swarm. I was telling my daughter about it this morning and she had to laugh that women of a certain age could get so excited over a bunch of bees. She really laughed when I jumped up and down after seeing my bees out after over a week of being confined by bad weather. She suffers me kindly.
I wish you happy years.İn addition toswarm very nice,.
Fantastic - exactly what you deserved after that previous episode. Were you able to discover where they originated?
Elva gave me gift vouchers from a UK beekeeping suppliers for Christmas and I've just spent them all (plus a little extra!) on new gear including my first top bar - very excited and will be watching developments downunder with special interest ;)
How I love this picture of your swarm! Last year was our first year of beekeeping and we had some swarms of our own bees (not what you want). But everyone of them - that we know about anyway - all swarmed to the same tree right next to the hives! They were easy to catch and we had enough empty boxes so we added more hives without buying more bees!
Many people would not understand how much excitement a swarm of honeybees can be!
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