REGARDING           RE>Lost swarm
 
Ted Wout writes:
"Today I lost my first swarm.  I had successfully overwintered one hive
and it was doing great until today.  While we were at church the hive
swarmed and landed on a neighbors tree.  While we were gone, my
neighbor had tried to get our attention by coming over and blowing
their car horn.  They were afraid to get out of the car.  We weren't
home so they weren't successful.
 
By the time we got home, they were gone!  They could have only been on
the tree for about 1-1.5 hours max.  Do bees alight on a tree and then
go to their new home that quickly?  I was under the impression that
they stayed at their intermediate location much longer than that.
 
I'm hoping they haven't taken up residence in another neighbor's house.
 That would make things even worse than they are now.  They hive they
were in is at about half strength and many of them are drones.  I found
some queen cells and they are still uncapped so I'm hoping we'll have a
new queen soon.  I guess you can't catch them all."
 
Depending upon local conditions, it is not at all unusual for bees to sit for
such a short time in their intermediate location.  I remember when I was a
boy, in the '50's in Wisconsin, every Sunday in May and June we would hurry
home from church as soon as possible, then rush out to the beeyard to look for
hanging swarms.  My grandfather had 125 colonies, and used swarming as his
means of increase. (In retrospect, that surely was a lot of work and bother,
compared with the ease of making timely splits.)  We got most of them, I
imagine, but we often rushed around to get set up to shake down a swarm, just
to have the whole thing explode into the air with a roar and take off for
parts unknown.  What a disappointment!
 
Ted Fischer