It’s not a bad movie (well, ok, it is that, too). It was my weekend.

We inspected our honeybee hives on Saturday morning and were startled to see that two of our newer hives had no brood in them. No baby bees means no queen bee is laying eggs. That’s bad. We called Jim Kloek at Nature’s Nectar, our bee expert. He said it was too late in the season to introduce new queens, and told us how to add the bees from the queenless hives to our other hives.

“But you have to make sure they haven’t swarmed,” he said.

I turned to Deidre, my partner in beekeeping and life, and shook my head.

“Nah, I don’t think they swarmed,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said. “They have plenty of room.”

Just 15 minutes later, Deidre was mowing the yard when she stopped abruptly in front of an apple tree and shouted for me. There was a swarm of honeybees clustered on a branch. We looked at each other. We were stupid. And lucky to have happened upon the swarm. But, now what do we do? Time to call Jim again.

Following his instructions, we got out an empty box and positioned it below the swarm. Then fully clad in my white coveralls beesuit, sweating profusely, I climbed the apple tree and layed out on the branch. I was very aware that if my neighbors didn’t already think I was strange, this would provide ample evidence. Then I vigorously shook the branch.

A good clump of bees fell right in the box and Deidre covered it. After letting the bees settle down, we took them to the beeyard. In a few days, we’ll see if there’s a queen in the box. Then, we’ll have to call Jim again to plot our next move. In the meantime, I’ve got to do some homework and see if I can figure out why the bees swarmed in the first place. I just love a good mystery, don’t you?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under Bees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.