First, the good news: our 2 brand new hives are doing what they should be doing at this stage, drawing out comb, collecting nectar, bringing in pollen, and the Queens are starting to lay eggs. Now the bad news: Hive 1 (Queen Charlotte), our established hive that came through winter like a champ…well, a week ago this hive swarmed 🙁 Our web cam captured the moment of mass exodus, which is actually pretty amazing. It’s like rats from a sinking ship…
The morning after our swarm retrieval attempt, there they were, still up on that #%!#* branch, mocking us. However, when Rob got home from work yesterday they were gone 😢 That makes it almost 48 hrs (at least) that they hung out on that branch before up and leaving. Seems like quite a long time to be in limbo, no? At any rate, we wished them well and got on with our lives until…this afternoon I got a text from
In case you missed it, 2 days ago we discovered a swarm clustered about 40 feet up a tree in our backyard. The next afternoon it was still there, and only a few scout bees were checking out our bait hive. The branch they were on was too high to safely reach with even our longest ladder. I had seen just enough crazy YouTube videos to think there might still be a way! Let’s just say there are some creative folks out there:
Today (May 4th), just as I was thinking about leaving work and heading to the gym I get this frantic text from Rob (and my panicked reply): Apparently, he had just happened to look out the back window and noticed a dark mass hanging off a branch about 30-40 feet up in a tree in the back yard. So I raced home, sure that it was one of our hives that had swarmed! When we had done our inspection on