We had one of our honey bee hives swarm. I was working in the garden and could hear them buzzing much, much louder than ever before. I went to investigate and saw a cloud of bees at the top of a nearby pine tree. They massed around the queen on a branch for a couple hours and then took up residence in one of the swarm traps 250 feet from the apiary. Now, we just need to install them into a proper Layens hive back in the aviary/orchard.
In hindsight, we probably should have split that particular hive into 2 hives when we did our spring hive inspection. The hive had 12 full frames with lots of brood. We decided during the Spring inspection to just add an additional 7 frames for them to use realizing that they needed more room. We didn’t see any queen cells, which would have indicated an impending swarm. The split probably would have prevented them swarming. Live and learn.
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| It’s a terrible picture, but the initial swarm was so high up massing around a pine branch in the center of the pict. |
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| The swarm of bees ended up moving into our swarm trap at the back of our property. |
