SPRING CLEANING.
And suddenly, it is spring. It came rather explosively and seemingly overnight – one week, snow. The next, dogwood blooms and the bleating of newborn lambs and tick checks and cutting seed potatoes – definitely springtime.I spent Saturday morning bathing in the sun outside, working on cleaning up the old bee hives. The wacky color scheme was out of neccessity – not having enough of any one color to paint the boxes, I found a bag of old film cannisters left over from my art school days, each filled with some color I had mixed long ago and preserved, not wanting it to go to waste. With lots of help from Ira's chickens, I banged off the leftover propolis and wax from the hives and filled the hive body (the bigger, green box) with brand new frames full of fresh beeswax. Jesse had been suspecting a swarm from our one remaining hive, and the plan was to set up the empty hive next to the active one, hoping it would be an appealing home. We really didn’t want to lose a swarm to the woods!
So yesterday morning, we headed up to the cabin. Jesse went to work felling trees and I set up the empty hive in its old spot. Not half an hour later, Jesse and I were standing in front of the hives, talking about swarming and how surely it was too early for the bees to swarm and other such things….when we started to notice the bees becoming louder….and louder….flying in circles and rising higher and higher. The noise was completely unnerving, a sort of swelling, causing us to start backing away from the hive. And then – a literal spilling of bees, pouring out of the front of the hive, joining the heaving mass that filled the sky. It was AMAZING – a swarm! We stood in awe, as the large mass slowly weaved and bobbed in the wind. After a few minutes, there was a calming down, and Jesse was able to spot them a little ways up the path, where they had settled on the branch of a cedar tree, about 20 feet up.Now, I have read many books about bees and about the capturing of swarms. And it seems that every book gives the same anecdote: the bees will swarm, flying a short distance from the hive (as the queen cannot fly for a long distance). They will settle on a nearby, low-lying tree branch. At this point, you can easily cut off the branch and walk it to your bee box, thumping them off and closing the lid. The end. That story is all well and good, but it has been my experience that this never happens, and the bees inevidably fly UP and out of the hive, always out of reach. You end up having to cut off brances that fall heavily to the ground and the bees explode into a bomb of chaos. Nothing quite like the images in the book of a happy man, wearing no protective clothing, calmly carrying a twig-sized branch of smiling bees to his hive.After much deliberation, mosly on my part (remembering Jesse’s reaction to just one sting last time), we decided to go for it. We really didn't want to lose the swarm, and the timing of everything just seemed to fortuitous to pass up. Jesse climbed the cedar and cut the branch holding the mass of bees. It fell only a little ways before resting on lower branches, so Jesse systematically cut off the lower branches, lowering the swarm slowly to the ground. It really couldn’t have worked out better. Once it was on the ground, it was a quick race to carry the branch with the swarm over to the new hive (the one that I had TRULY just set out half an hour before), give the branch a few good thwacks against the top of the hive, and watch the clumps of bees tumble into the hive. At this point, everyone was a tad bit upset, and we backed off and let them settle a bit. We waited and hoped and prayed - that the queen had made it into the box, that the bees would take to their new home, that they wouldn't simply regroup and leave again.
And that is a very long story to say this: Early this morning we stood anxiously in front of the two hives, and finally we saw – bees coming and going from BOTH hives, as casually and naturally as if nothing had ever happened! I am feeling quite blessed, mostly with luck and timing, as we have been hearing that this was a very hard year for Kentucky beekeepers. Although we lost one hive, we realized it in time to harvest some surprise honey. And only a couple weeks later, we were able to replace the lost hive with a new one. A successful capture of a swarm, and a very happy beginning to the spring.- Hannah.