A little before our French lesson, Doug popped outside to do some small thing, to be greeted with a loud buzz from the bee hive area. One of them had just swarmed!
Quick! Prepare the spare hive, suit up and catch them and do it quickly so we can make it to our lesson on time!
We think we got the queen, but need better weather for an inspection to be sure.
It means they are very happy and felt they had the strength to split in two. But from our point of view it is not what we want as they will spend time gaining their strength back instead of making honey.
They obligingly settled not too high off the ground. They stay like this for quite some time while scouts go and look for good nest sights.
We knocked them off the tree in to a box and then poured most of the box full in to the spare hive, leaving the rest to follow through the entrance. You can’t really make out what is going on, so no way to be sure we got the queen other than waiting. Hopefully when Doug can open the hive when the weather is better he will see brood and other signs that there is an active queen.
The old hive that the swarm left will be busy making themselves a new queen. Hopefully we can combine the two parts back together with a bit more space and they can get on with gathering honey…
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