Bee Chronicles July 2011

It is July. The temperature is rising. The Humidity is stifling. The bees are as happy as can be.

Here in the southern Appalachian Mountains the spring nectar flow has been over for 2-3 weeks. What are the bees doing? They are getting ready to swarm. If they did not swarm before the nectar flow they are in a better position to do it now. The hives are full of honey. The population of foragers is up. The brood chamber is full. There is a dirth of nectar. Let’s go look for greener pastures.

After the white clover finishes blooming en mass, there is very sparse nectar. The bees have to range farther for a days work. Combining all the above conditions tells the queen it is time to divide the colony and start building another for winter.

What does swarming look like before it happens? The queen stops laying eggs for about 10 days to get trim enough to fly. This really upsets the worker bees. They will get noisey . As the lack of eggs progresses the bees will fly around above the hive just being confused. The nurse bees will start drawing out queen cells that will hatch 5 days after the old queen leaves. On the day of swarming, if you are lucky enough to see it, the queen will leave the hive and fly around in an ascending spiral like a tornado, and off they go. They will usually land on about the nearest tall thing, the queen is not a good flyer. The scouts will go out and start looking for a new site. This may take all day or several hours.

What can you do to stop it? Go through you hives on a weekly basis and kill the queen cells. Also give the hive something to do. Put in some foundation frames and let them draw come. This can either be brood comb or honey comb to be used in rotating your old comb out of the hive. You can draw off bees to create nucs. This will give the queen an incentive to stay and lay more eggs. You may want to draw comb and feed the bees syrup because of the dirth condition. This creates more work. More space and more work are the keys to not swarming. Second and third year old queens want to swarm more than anything else.

How to capture a swarm if you can’t stop it? Get suited up, get syrup spay, get a ladder, and get a box. Climb up to the swarm. Spray syrup in the catch box. This will hold the bees in the box. If the bees are on a branch, just cut the branch and lay it in the box. If they are on a tree trunk, post, or side of a building, sweep them gently into the box. Spray the bees as they go into the box to keep the next group clustered to the first. The queen is smack dab in the middle of the cluster, be careful and make sure you get her. You probably will leave a few hundred bees. All those scouts that are out will come back to the last place the swarm was. You can try to capture them later. Spraying the spot with syrup will help hold them there.

Now just settle these bees into a new hive body and you are ready to go.

During this dirth period is the time to get ready for sourwood nectar flow. It will start early this year. Maybe about the time you read this article. Mid July is the normal target date, but I am seeing blossom stems 8” long the second week of June. To me that is a month early. Watch the sunny road sides for the first hints of white as the rows of buds develop on the flowers. There is still good moisture at tree root depth. Couple that with the occasional afternoon thunderstorm and I predict a good hopefully long sourwood season. We don’t need violent wind and hail with the storms, that knocks the nectar out of the blossoms. We don’t need scorching hot days, that dries the blossoms out of nectar. High humidity during the day will keep the nectar in the blossoms.

If you can locate a place higher or lower in altitude than you normally keep your bees you can extend your nectar collection period. Move the bees down hill early in the season and up hill later. You will gain about 2 weeks for every 250 feet in elevation that you move. There are a lot of variables here, but, it can be worth the effort if there isn’t too much effort.

No time to rest!