Welcome to Little Dipper Forge!!!

Sorry we missed the meeting Monday.  No, REALLY!!

Feel free to share this with anyone you wish – it is quite an unusual story - even if I do say so myself.

Well, we tried and we tried Monday night ‘til dark, and couldn’t get the swarm out of the tree permanently (I was pruning with a shotgun – not an easy task when the tree is a white oak and the limbs they insisted landing upon were as big as my forearm and at least 30 feet up).  I had gotten much of the swarm onto the ground and into a hive once during the evening – but they did not stay.  So I finally gave up and went to bed.  Yesterday morning (Tuesday) they were still there.  I figured “maybe we’ll get lucky” and they will find the hives I had stationed under them and set up housekeeping for me after all.  Well I got home Tuesday afternoon and by golly they were STILL in that tree!  So out comes the shotgun again – the neighbors probably think I am totally INSANE – but finally, FINALLY I got the limb they were on down – it involved a lot of advanced simple machines (ropes and more shotgun shells), Whew!!

So FINALLY I wore through the limb they were on and the entire mass landed right on one of the hives I had placed on the ground, below  – yee – haaaaaa!!!  Bees were flying everywhere – but I got some newspaper and started gently scooping bees towards the hive entrance (we are talking 10 pounds of bees minimum – the biggest swarm I have ever seen) and they dutifully marched in for a while.  I watched and waited and coaxed and scooped and waited and….. then I looked up into the tree again – AND to my complete and utter dismay  – there was about half of the swarm UP IN THE TREE again in a very well formed cluster with no agitation (indicating to me that the queen was probably present in that cluster) – on a limb about as big around as my LEG!!  OH MY!!!

I was sure I had missed the queen – and she was up on the tree.  The hive had a lot of bees in it and they were fanning their tails like crazy – like the ones there thought they had found a new HOME – so I still had hopes of coaxing the swarm into that hive – though those hopes were waning.

I poured a little sugar water on the front porch of the hive and they lapped it up - I was thinking I might still coax them into that hive and I wanted to keep the mass that was there from leaving again – I had gone through a similar exercise Monday night and all the bees had left the hive and joined the bees in the tree again.  I repeated adding sugar water to the front stoop a couple times over 20 or 30 minutes and added an entrance feeder to the hive, too.  There were a lot of bees in the hive, so I added a second brood chamber (the first had DRAWN comb in it) and the bees on the outside of the hive started filing in.  Then after about 30 minutes the swarm in the tree started to take flight – what a sight – and a sickening feeling – because it appeared that the bees in the hive were starting to take flight too.  What a bummer.

Well they did not fly off, they just kept circling the tree – what a cacophony!!   Sounded beautiful – because they were NOT flying AWAY!!

About 15 minutes later they were ALL OVER the hive and so I was beside myself, sore shoulder and all.  (If you take all the times I had fired a shotgun in my entire life prior to this week and compared that to how many times I fired one this week – easily – this is the most I have ever used a shotgun in my entire life - easily.)

It is the biggest swarm I  have ever seen (I know, I said that once – but it is true), and I fed them more this morning before I went to work.  With drawn comb, I hope the queen will start laying within the week, and with that many bees I hope they can start to draw and fill the second brood chamber right away.  I hope they stay in my hive – I have had swarms leave before – so I plan to treat them REALLY NICELY to help assure that.  I just hope the entrance feeder does not start robbing amongst the hives in my yard – I may switch to an internal feeder tonight.

What an ordeal.  Now I have to go buy a bunch of shotgun ammo to replace all that I used up cutting that tree down to size  –  so I can be ready for the next swarm!!!!!  I did get a little firewood out of the deal though.

What an adventure!!!!!