Repost from [mtbakerbees] my weirdest bee experience to date

[Mohan Raj]

So...as referenced in the title, I had my strangest bee experience ever yesterday afternoon.

 

I was getting ready to do routine inspections, having done the last ones on Friday the 23.  At that time, there was no signs of swarm in any of the hives save a nuc that I had split up.

 

T1:  Almost ready to go out and inspect and see swarm activity in the air towards a huge tree in the greenbelt I border on.  While it would seem that the most likely origin would be *my* yard, for the life of me I am unable to fathom where it would have originated.  Mildly discouraged, I mumble beekeeper epithets under my breath and go to suit up and inspect a ridiculous amount of nucs created this year to keep swarming in check. (without 100% success, BTW...Swarming urges this year have been ridiculous likely due to a very early start in spring build up.)

 

T2: (+/- 90 minutes later) I determine 1) that it is VERY unlikely that swarm originated from my hives, and 2) that I have at least one more queen than I need.  I pull out the unlucky queen from the very small, nuc I had been storing her in and proceed to dispatch of her using my usual method:  I put her on a hard surface (my deck) about 25 feet away from her previous home and use one finger to crush her little head/thorax.  This is my usual method - instantaneous death, minimum of mess. I then flick her little corpse into the weeds, toss my gloves onto the BBQ lid, and take another queen I had removed from a nuc I am combining  to my bathroom inside to stuff her into a cage.   

 

T3: (+/- 15 minutes later) I come out to the most bizarre sight...Bees flying EVERYWHERE outside my basement exit, a large clump on the top of my BBQ grill on my gloves, a smaller clump where I had dispatched the queen, and a small patch about a foot away where it seems that her corpse had inadvertently dropped on its way to the weeds. There were also groups of bees settling on the fronts of the nucs that I had been placing into combining set up a bit earlier.  I closed down the entrance of the nuc that happened to be facing towards these mysterious bees to keep confused strangers from entering, confirmed that her dead royal subjects were still in their box and not among those flying about  and started taking pictures and processing what just happened.  

My theory is that the swarm came from who knows where, but somehow the queen either didn't leave with them or ran into trouble somewhere - in any case, they did not have her with them.  This would explain why the swarm never seemed to properly settle down in the big tree they were flying around.  Somehow, scout bees happend to catch a whiff of the QMP released when I killed the extra queen and a switch flipped in their little minds that said "that's her scent!"  They then called all of their companions over where they settled on the area where she was terminated, the area where her body still remained, and on top of my gloves, one fingertip which smelled like the deceased queens QMP.  Now...what to do?   They were clumping here and there, but a great amount were still milling about the air.  

 

I decided to see if they would move into a box.  I didn't have enough spare equipment at that point for a hive set up but we get pretty good at improvising, don't we?  I Magyvered a setup from pieces of insulation foam and a hive box and left it near the clumps on the ground.  I then tossed in the gloves that they were so attracted to and the queen cadaver, put the lid on top askew so that there were a number of entrances for the bees to enter and before long the bees were entering and the  congregation areas had thinned out.  I had gone back to my existing hives for some final frame manipulations and while doing so I grabbed a half frame of mostly-capped brood and put it in the new box along with a couple of frames that I had on hand.  An hour later everybody was in the box and I pulled the top cover over it.  This morning, right after placing the two nucs  I was combining, I grabbed the missing pieces needed for a hive set up, placed the box of bees on top of it (after pulling out my gloves), put my spare caged queen in there and a jar feeder on top, and am leaving them along to construct wonky comb until I can get some frames assembled.

 

Never a dull moment.

 

Julia