Hat Full of Bees

in #bees5 years ago

I was relaxing in my workshop while I was steam bending a set of chair legs and guess what I saw.

There was a cloud of bees over my apiary!

A healthy colony can produce a swarm any time when there are drones available for mating, which is April to October here. Most of the time, though, a colony will swarm once in May then spend the rest of the season building back up.

This swarm is very late in the season, but the queen must be a good one if she produced a colony vigorous enough to swarm during our dry season.

The swarm gathered on a small persimmon tree, so they were easy to catch. I just held my hat under the bee cluster and shook the tree to knock them loose then dumped them into a little hive box. I even got a glimpse of the queen as she scurried down between the frames.

Cheers, Professor Bromide

Check out @Homesteaderscoop for all kinds of sustainable handmade goods. I have some whole comb pressed honey up there, plus beeswax, and a maybe a little propolis.

Homesteaders Co-op

A community marketplace of ethical, handmade and sustainable products available for STEEM, SBD (and USD): https://homesteaderscoop.com

follow: @homesteaderscoop

Posted using Partiko Android

Sort:  

Did you get stung doing that? As much as I want to support bees, I can't shake my early childhood memories. One involved my brother and I discovering this thing on the ground (a fallen hive) and like any good little boy, he decided it should be stomped on!

I only got stung twice on my hands. Swarms are pretty docile that way.

Your brother sounds like my kind of guy. No excitement in leaving things be. I recall a childhood game that involved taking turns poking a stick into a paper wasp nest until someone got stung.

Posted using Partiko Android

It certainly made for some excitement. I don't remember much of it now but the bees got up our sleeves and pant legs. They chased us to the house and I remember two things. First, my Mom with both of us by the hands running across a field to the neighbour's while he drove his car across the field to meet us, and secondly, sitting on Mom's knee at the doctors, after the stingers were out, watching her dab ointment on 5 places on one arm. I had 22 stings and he had 17. We were probably 5 and 4. Not my kind of excitement! lol

Congratulations on catching the swarm! I hope they have enough honey to get through the winter. In our neck of the woods, the prevailing wisdom is that May swarms will do great, but August swarms will struggle. Do you feed your bees in the winter anyway?

I love the picture of the hat covered in bees!

I have some other small colonies that I can combine them with. They stayed in that little box for about 30 minutes then moved out. Lucky for me they moved into the empty half of a duplex hive. The other side of the duplex has a weak colony in it that I can combine with this one.

Posted using Partiko Android

I didn't do any late fall feeding last year. Maybe I will try a late season sugar board to help out the light hives this year.

Posted using Partiko Android

How wonderful that you saw them swarm and were able to combine the hive into another box. Best of luck with your newbies.

You've been visited by @porters from Homesteaders Co-op.
Smooth move! I'm glad your bees seem to be doing well and multiplying - to keep on producing all those wonderful products you have in your store at Homesteaders Coop! --- Homesteaders Co-op A community marketplace of ethical, handmade and sustainable products available for STEEM, SBD (and USD): https://homesteaderscoop.com follow: @homesteaderscoop

Thank you so much for being an awesome Partiko user! We have just given you a free upvote!

The more Partiko Points you have, the more likely you will get a free upvote from us! You can earn 30 Partiko Points for each post made using Partiko, and you can make 10 Points per comment.

One easy way to earn Partiko Point fast is to look at posts under the #introduceyourself tag and welcome new Steem users by commenting under their posts using Partiko!

If you have questions, don't feel hesitant to reach out to us by sending us a Partiko Message, or leaving a comment under our post!

Hi @professorbromide!

Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.166 which ranks you at #3286 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 4 places in the last three days (old rank 3282).

In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 143 contributions, your post is ranked at #34.

Evaluation of your UA score:
  • Some people are already following you, keep going!
  • The readers like your work!
  • Great user engagement! You rock!

Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70638.80
ETH 3565.34
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.73