Backyard Apiary

I inspected the hives today with Dan as a helper. It’s good having a second set of hands and eyes when inspecting a hive. Both hives will swarm. Due to the weather keeping me from getting in to the hive earlier than the last inspection turns out to mean that I missed my opportunity to prevent a swarm. Antheia has over a dozen capped swarm cells and Hegemone has a few. It seems that I was too late with the checkerboarding and the queens ran out of space. This explains all of the drone comb in the top box. The queen must have been desperately looking for empty cells to lay and the only ones available were previously used for honey storage. I’ve read about queen piping, but never heard it myself. I had the opportunity to hear piping queens in Antheia. It’s an interesting sound and had I not read as much as I did about beekeeping, I wouldn’t have recognized the sound. The lesson from this is to keep reading as much as possible because you never know when you’ll find the information to be useful.

I had wanted to split Antheia during the previous inspection, but didn’t due to the questionable queen status. Since the hive is going to swarm, I chose to make a split using the queen cell that was capped last time. I took 1 frame of capped honey, the frame with the queen cell, 2 frames of capped brood and a foundationless frame that was only partially drawn. The hive will share the name of last year’s attempted split, Chloris. The queen cell was capped last week, so she should emerge in the next couple of days and will hopefully be laying before May 1. This hive is slated to be relocated to a friend’s property about a mile away.

I have no chance of preventing the swarm, so I’ve shifted my strategy to swarm catching. I placed two empty hives with swarm lures. One is placed on top of my shed and the other is located on a play structure. My hope is that when the hives do swarm that they take up residence in one of the provided boxes, or stay in my property long enough for me to get home and catch the swarm. If I manage to catch two swarms, then I’ll need to scramble and make more equipment to hold the two packages I will install on May 1.

I made it through today’s inspection without getting stung despite earning at least one. My bees must have phoned ahead to my friend’s hives in Wake Forest. I visited Dave and had the opportunity to see his hives that were moved on to his roof. While standing on the roof about 15′ from the hive, I got “tagged” in the ear. It took a few minutes before it hurt at all, then it turned red and is now comically swollen. He apologized and felt bad. As a beekeeper, I expect to get stung whenever I am near a hive.