NCSBA & Swarm Control

This past weekend, March 9 & 10, I went to the NC State Beekeepers Association's Spring gathering in my hometown of Morganton, NC, right in the foothills of the Appalachians. It was wonderful to be greeted by the sweet, clean mountain air, blue skies, sun peeking over the moutains and the gorgeous campus of the NC School for the Deaf.

I spent some time at lunch Saturday walking around the cute downtown. Nothing had changed in 38 years from when I'd been there, my parents taking me "into town" from our home in Glen Alpine, a suburb of Morganton. While jazz sounded from the street corner PA system, I found this Civil War memorial. I do love history. The Confederate past left a lasting mark in Morganton.

The memorial was at the town's historic courthouse. Here's the marker. It's wild to see the words "Raided by Union force 1865." This stuff really happened. Amazing to think of it, and be thankful for the present.

It's beautiful. I love the clocktower and columns. Local cut stone. Wow.

I learned so much at the state meeting, and got all of my questions answered I had going into this Spring. I just knew that not having done full inspections so far, seeing the hives bursting at the seams, that it was a matter of time before hives Boris and Natasha swarm. Not in my first honey year, please! I spent so long getting to this point. At the meeting I was anxious and praying the whole time I wasn't missing my last moments of opportunity. I shouldn't have been so conservative about the weather, and forged ahead with inspections in February once the temps got above 53. So I spent a lot of time prepping for setup of my two nucs in case I found swarm cells and had to split, or wanted to give them more room and raise two backup queens. Yep, it's time for hives 4 and 5 to start.

I thought I was going to get rid of my hatless veil, so I tried this standard plastic, ventillated safari hat with veil that my brother gave me. Ugh, I hated it. The black screen was hard to see through, as was the bar of support fabric right along my eye level. I quickly went back to my always cool hatless veil. You can't beat it for the price. Cheap, effective and cool, and the white netting is easy to see through.

I had to get my equipment set up. If the worst-case scenario was that my hives were getting ready to swarm at any moment (swarm cells), I had to have equipment ready to go. Also, I am now convinced you should always have a backup queen or two. Regardless, it was time to prepare the nucs. I hadn't thought ahead about the stands, so I quickly grabbed what concrete elements I had. My location has a slight decline to the back and to one side, so I had to adjust by adding shims on the left side and a taller support in the back. I know this is totally country / redneck style, but bed slats were what I had available. Use what you got (and get that backup equipment!).

Just prepping all of the equipment took TONS more time than I was anticipating ... as in all afternoon. For some reason no one makes entrance reducers for nucs. They need one, so the few bees in there can more easily defend their hive and not get robbed by the neighboring colonies. I took standard reducers and cut them to size. I used the remaining pieces to create shims so I would squish less bees when putting the boxes back in place (which actually worked, combined with smoke). Also had to get the inner screens, 9-frame spacer, lighter, brush, bricks ... bottom boards ... what else? Oh, I had to build out some more deep frames to replace the ones I'd be putting in the nucs, as well as some for a super I intended on putting on Natasha. Nectar already is coming in, I suspected, since the Bradford pears, yellowbells, peach trees and dandelions are in bloom. LESSON: think ahead and prep all the equipment BEFORE you need it!!!

_FINALLY I could get to Boris & Natasha. The top super which was half full of empty frames and half full of partially drawn foundation was full of bees.

A TON of bees were on the bottom. Boris is maxed out and boiling over with bees! These girls were on the underside of the screened bottom board, apparently to make room. I've read recently you can give them more room and ventillation to hang out and not crowd the brood nest by putting a slatted rack atop the bottom board, and a shim around it, then the first hive body atop that. But I didn't have a 9-frame slatted rack (don't even know if they make those).

I was delighted to see that just using the wedge as a starter strip on the frames actually worked. Here's one super frame started. And yes, down below there's a bit of a mess I had to clean up comb-wise. I shouldn't have let 2 weeks pass since my last visit. Their natural comb has a circular roll to it I find fascinating. The bees festoon and hang from the starter strip, and spin out the wax from there as they go, holding onto a leg or two from an adjoining bee while working. Amazing. I took this twisted piece and gently put it in line with the other pieces they were drawing down.

A foundation frame that was a total mess. Foundation is no guarantee they won't go wonky on you and start building all kinds of crazy comb if you ignore them. BUT, this was the worst-case scenario: a swarm cell was in place. I'd put the super on to give the queen more room if she needed it. She did. And they started a swarm cell. Worse, it was capped. I only had possibly hours to prevent my expensive queen and the hive I'd worked so hard at building from a nuc from swarming, never to return! The clock was ticking.

Here's a closeup of the beautiful swarm cell, bottom left. It was capped. Swarm cells are light in color, and supercedure queen cells are darker and brown in color. Something else I learned this past weekend at the NCSBA spring meeting. The larvae you see are drones. More signs of swarm. More drones, more urge to swarm. Since this was from the super and the comb was so bad, I couldn't use it in my nuc. I especially couldn't use it when my butter-fingers popped the swarm cell  off by mistake. Seeing a swarm cell in the top super, but sensing that the full hive was still there, I knew there' be more to find. There were: in Boris alone there were 5 capped swarm cells and 1 uncapped. I placed 1 capped and the 1 uncapped cell from a deep frame into one nuc, and the other frame with cells into the other nuc, GINGERLY and hopefully not damaging these precious cells. If Boris swarms, these are my backup queens. They'll take 4 weeks to mature and start laying, possibly more. Another 2 weeks on top of that if I didn't have swarm cells. The delay would hit me hard during the spring honey flow. I had a lot more work to do, finding all the swarm cells and transferring them to the nucs. While I was in, I found one frame ENTIRELY filled with rainbow pollen, both sides. The brood nest was not only honey- but pollen- and nectar-bound. There was quite a bit of fresh nectar in those frames.

And then, there was this. A GORGEOUS piece of natural comb, perfectly drawn from the top wedge, on a super frame. They'd just attached it to the bottom. Since I hadn't had time to make an inspection prior to this, I was hoping that by putting all of those nurse bees to work would buy me some time. It seems it did. You can see a clump of girls working in the top right corner where they still need to draw down. While I was inspecting frame by frame, getting all of the swarm cells out of the supers and brood boxes, I also reversed the deeps. I pulled out 7 frames in all from the deeps, replacing them with empty frames. Hopefully they'll go to work and give the queen much more room to lay and NOT think about swarming. Now, onto Natasha, as the sun was fading. I found the queen on a frame. She was pretty plump and not so fast. Before swarming the bees will chase the queen around to slim her up, preparing her for flight.

Natasha also was boiling over with bees. A big lump formed in my throat.

The top deep was very full. Look inbetween the frames from overhead, and you can see the cluster formed. As the sun was setting (and my phone was losing juice), they were clustering up top. I had to hurry. No time for a frame by frame inspection this night. I pulled the top box off, then tipped it up so I could look underneath. NO SWARM CELLS.

_I did the same for the bottom deep. Here's what it looked like from above. I was afraid I'd ruined swarm cells when I saw all these larvae, but they were drone larvae and pupae on the bottom of the top box since I didn't see any swarm cells. I cleaned all this up. I thanked my stars and reversed Natasha. Then I put a super atop her. Now I MUST do an inspection fairly soon to make sure she has no intention of swarming, either. At this time they were getting pretty ticked off.

Rest easy, girls. Time was up, the sun was down, and I was pooped. The whole time I got 3 bees underneath my veil, and one underneath my foot and inside my shoe (on 4 separate occasions). I remained calm, cleared them out and didn't get stung, amazingly. Lots of lessons were learned this Sunday. If only I had ... if only. I suspect beekeepers say that to themselves a lot.