John's swarm

Just helped hive a swarm in Potrero. 1 million gay people from all over the world can't get me to walk one block from my apartment to join the party. But a swarm of bees will get me off the couch and into the bee suit in ten seconds flat.

My friend John called to ask what to do, his bees swarmed into the neighbor's apple tree.  I raced right over with a box and my suit.  The swarm was easy, it was on a low branch and John already had a ladder set up beneath it.  Ill I had to do was shake it into the cardboard box and dump them into their new home. 

He has access to a very cool piece of property behind his house that actually belongs to CalTran.  There is a buffer on either side of the freeway made up of weed trees and giant blackberry patches.  He cleared his out and put in a bunch of raised beds for vegetables and planted fruit trees.  Last year he tried beekeeping but his hive died.  This year his hive swarmed and now he has two!

red and black queen

We figured if the sun stays out long enough today we will be pulling honey frames out of the beehives and harvesting it all weekend.  We figured wrong.

No Honey. Bees are on strike. Each hive has its own issues and demands. None include giving us any extra honey. But we did find a red queen who is making blond and redheaded bees. And then a black queen who is laying dark black and gray bees. Wish I had the camera with me.

The Small Swarm and the School Yard Bees are not really thriving.  We could not find a queen  but it seemed like there was larvae.  The populations seem to be dwindling.  I did not smell or see foulbrood.  Maybe the old queens are just not laying well and they will make a new queen.  

The Split is doing OK after we treated them with antibiotics, but we would have liked to add a few frames of brood and nurse bees to boost the population to get them going.  Unfortunately, none of the other colonies had anything to spare.  We also realized that we should have pulled the capped honey frames out of the Split before we gave them antibiotics because now we cannot use it for human consumption.  

Our Big Hive looked like it was doing great so we did not open up the brood boxes.  They tend to be aggressive so we figured no need to bother them if they were doing OK.  Their honey supers were close to being finished but not quite ready.  We moved some of the capped and partially capped frames of honey from the smaller weaker hives into the Big Hive's supers so the Big Hive could finish them up quickly and we could harvest them maybe next week.  

Here's to the first (and late) harvest of 2011.