A Spring Swarm! A Beekeepers Journal

Sunday – April 26th – today is swarm day…

I caught a swarm from the Brooktrails hive today!
Easiest swarm catch ever – let’s hope they stay in their new home…

Last hive check,about 10 days ago – the hive was super healthy & stuffed
with bees, so good to see after the worries of last summer with our small
colony, minimal stores and spotty brood patterns.
I had noted a large supercedure cell on the bottom of a central frame with
about 7 nurse bees busily surrounding it, and lots of new capped brood
cells – both workers and drone, and happily “frame heavy” with tons of
honey & pollen!
Certainly it seemed like a swarm was imminent – so we prepared a swarm box
(a deep box nailed to a screen bottom with 7 frames of slightly drawn comb
surrounding a central open space)…how many days until this new queen
would emerge?
Karina out of town,both of us with busy schedules, and May Day weekend
coming up…

Today, just as I finished cleaning after the Grange pancake breakfast,
Lanny called – a swarm had begun, and within an hour had made a huge
elongated knot on  the branch of an apple tree just a few feet in front of
the old hive!

I took a vial of “swarm lure” (queen pheromone)out of the freezer, washed
up, changed my clothes to a fresh light colored shirt & pants, sprayed my
hair and body with lavender water…and took my beekeepers bag up the hill
to Karina’s hive. We prepared a spray bottle with sugar syrup, and I
immediately sprayed the swarm with some, then tipped some of the lure into
the swarm box, on the top of a frame,  into the middle “hole” and a bit on
the front landing. I sprayed inside the new box with sugar as well.

John Wagenet & Lanny were very helpful as we carefully repositioned the
box right under the swarm, leveled it and finally – after more sugar
spaying, a few scouts came into the box. I was concerned as we kept
fiddling with the box to get it level, and the frames were sometimes
knocking around, and I felt the scouts might think this box was not a very
stable new home!

We observed for another 20 minutes, occasionally spraying the swarm and
the new box with sugar. Their branch was very old, thick and would be hard
to cut and lower into the box, so I decided to knock them down into the
box, rather than wait much longer. One large shake of the branch, & most
of the swarm fell – “thonk” – into the box, a few minutes later I did it
again,after spraying with the syrup several times.  After 3-4 swift shakes
of the branch, only a few were left lagging  behind on the branch.  The
Virgin Queen must have been captured!
We left the lid off to be closed in a few hours before the day cools off.
I hope the bees naturally choose this new home.  Last year I forced the
swarm into a box, and taped it shut for 24 hours,  but this time I want
them to choose their future more naturally.
I do hope the swarm stays put and after a few days I will move it into my
“Food Forest”. Finally – I will have a hive in my own Garden…how
wonderful!

Honey – divine nectar , edible bee love and sacred food

I fell in love with the taste of honey as a young girl, and especially loved creamed honey on toast – or comb honey eaten right off of the spoon. Chewing the beeswax for an hour longer was a bonus from this special treat. Taking a moment to savor the vision of golden syrup as it dripped from the hexagonal cells was another aspect of my wonderful memories of comb honey.

And…

I still go off of my “let’s eat carefully of this precious nectar diet” when there is a chance to eat biscuits dripping with golden nectar!

The wonderful & best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Secret Life of Bees” unfolds in a sentimental, honey-glazed land that vaguely resembles South Carolina in 1964. The movie is almost as good as the book – for describing the inner life of its complex characters…I cried all the way through!

There is a scene in the movie – “The Secret Life of Bees” – when Lily smashes several jars of honey in her anger at her lack of mother-love. This abundance of wasted honey really brings home how powerful that loss must have been – for her to destroy the life work of her beloved bees. (One worker bee actually makes

only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.)

But – that is not the point of this brief post…I merely wanted to remind my readers that honey is precious – so precious that it takes a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 154 trips, carrying tiny amounts of nectar from the flower to the hive, just to make one teaspoon of honey. The days of cooking with an entire cup of honey are long gone in my life…as a natural food devotee in the 1970’s I ate more than my share of this divine nectar. So I hope that we all begin to offer greater respect for the trials of the honey bee in these times of CCD – let’s eat honey wisely, offer our blessings to the bee, and begin to keep hives locally! That will develop better genetic strains of bee that may weather this time of collapse, which I believe mirrors the overall environmental stress of our current Planet -wide crisis.

Honey has been used as a medicine and a sacred food since before the ancient Egyptians began to keep hives.

So – hey – Let’s get back to a sense of the sacred with all of our foods, and especially those which are truly precious and rare, hard to get and involve the sacrifices of our fellow species.

Blessed Bee.