Weekend and Almost Swarm

There are peaceful country drives… and then there are bee runs. 🐝🚙💨

Visit to Steve's Bees ~ Lucinda, PA

This week’s adventure took us up to Steve's Bees to pick up our newest ladies. Packages loaded, excitement high, weather questionable. The kind of spring day where the clouds look personally offended.

Now, most sensible people might wear their bee hoods for the ride home.

We are apparently not most sensible people.

To be fair, the bees were packaged. Mostly contained. “Mostly” doing some very ambitious heavy lifting here.

By the time we hit the road in the Bronco Sport, we noticed a few escape artists buzzing around the vehicle. Then a few more. Then roughly sixty tiny airborne felons circling the interior like they were planning a hostile takeover of the vehicle. Eventually, nearly all of them gathered on my driver’s side window while I was driving, creating what can only be described as the world’s least reassuring blind spot.

A couple decided I looked trustworthy enough to land on. One settled on my chest. Another parked itself on my arm. At this point, there’s a very specific kind of calm you enter. It’s somewhere between “nature documentary narrator” and “this is how the local newspaper writes about me.”

Surprisingly, nobody got stung.

The bees honestly had every reason to be cranky. Saturday’s weather was absolutely miserable. Cold, wet, muddy, and windy. Honey bees hate cold rain about as much as cats hate bathtubs. Then after settling in, they got moved again Monday, which bees also do not appreciate. Imagine someone shaking your entire house, relocating it, and then expecting you to immediately go back to work collecting groceries.

Still, they made the trip like champs. They are now settled in a hive that isn't a cardboard bee mover.

Tuesday ~ Almost Swarm at Getz Yard

Then came Tuesday.

While mowing, Dad noticed one of the hives had bees hanging in a giant cluster on the front entrance. This behavior is called bearding. In the middle of summer, bearding is pretty common. Bees gather outside the hive in warm weather to help regulate temperature and airflow inside. Think of it as thousands of tiny HVAC technicians working overtime.

But in early spring? ...that gets our attention.

Especially because if you’ve been following along, you know we already split this hive once earlier this season.

A split is basically controlled bee math. Beekeepers intentionally divide a strong colony into two colonies to reduce overcrowding and help prevent swarming. Swarming is when the old queen leaves with about half the hive population to start a new colony somewhere else. From the bees’ perspective, it’s reproduction and survival. From the beekeeper’s perspective, it’s watching your workforce fly into a tree and disappear into the sunset like a tiny winged Western movie.

So Chris and Liz dug into the hive to investigate. And wow.

The colony was absolutely bursting with bees. Wall to wall fuzz. They also found multiple swarm cells, which are special queen cells the bees build when they’re preparing to swarm. They look like little peanut-shaped capsules hanging from the frames. Once you see several of them, the bees are basically announcing, “We have plans, and you are not included.”

No queen was found during the inspection, but honestly, that isn’t shocking in a hive exploding with bees. Finding one queen among tens of thousands of moving insects can feel like trying to spot a single grain of rice in a shag carpet.

The good news is they were able to separate the swarm cells into two hives and add empty drawn comb to give the colonies more room. Empty comb is valuable because it gives bees instant space for brood or honey storage without having to spend energy building wax first. More room often helps calm the colony’s urge to swarm.

At least that’s the plan. With bees, sometimes you feel like a seasoned beekeeper. Other times you’re just a confused landlord standing in a cloud of insects asking everyone politely to stop making queens.

So now we wait, watch, and hope the girls decide to stay home instead of launching Operation Airborne Relocation.

 

Beekeeping season has officially begun. Chaos included. 🐝