Dear Bee-L'ers:
 
   We arrived back from our Florida bees last week to South Carolina, to find
swarms galore.  The season is about a week early, and I am about a week later
than I had wanted to be.  Dewberries are in full bloom.
 
   For those of you a little farther north, especially if you might get busy
and not get back to the bees on a timely basis, now is a good time to stack
your deadouts on top of something (Do a post mortem to make sure there's no
AFB scale first).
 
   We've found eight so far that have been occupied by happy swarms, and we've
 caught two (not from our bees).  I say set the deadouts up, because they
will attract swarms much better if they are higher, though sometimes they
will even come into low hives too.
 
   Right now we are on fast forward.  We've been splitting the bees that are
swarmy, and so far, have been mostly ahead of them, which gives us lots of
cells.  I used to avoid using swarm cells, reasoning that that encourages the
swarmy trait in bees, but I've seen enough weak bees over the fast few years,
that I've decided that bees that are strong enough to swarm are just exactly
what I want.
 
   Each hive that looks good, but has no swarm cells we pull all but two
frames of sealed brood from the brood chamber and raise it above the
excluder, making sure the queen is below. I like to see them, but this year,
this usually means shaking the bees off the brood, and they'll have to walk
up through the excluder.
 
   We give the queen some nice empty comb in the center of the brood nest to
lay in.  This effectively stops swarming for a while, and over the first
(deep) super with brood, we place a couple shallows.
 
  Those that have swarm cells are busted up for spits.  Once they have the
idea of swarming, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Some hobbyists with
lots of time cut out the cells, but you are apt to miss just one, and it's
likely to be a little tiny one that makes a lousy queen.
 
   So the only practical way to save our livestock from running off into the
woods is to help them do what they wanted to do - reproduce.
 
   We're just about out of nuc boxes, and are running out of comb, so we are
trying an old trick that might be useful to others as well.  We have A LOT of
old junk deeps (with corners rotted off, etc.)  We bust up the swarmy bees
into 3-5 nucs.  Each nuc is placed along one side of a deep box (2-4 frames).
We don't look for queens once cells have formed, just making sure each nuc
has at least one cell.  Frames with cells are handled gently, and never
turned upside down, as the queens can be damaged if their wings are in
formation at the time.
 
   We place these on pallets with a strip of 15# builders felt on the bottom
to keep robbers out.  Then we take a piece of felt and put it over the tops of
 the frames and fold it down along the outside frame.  We make sure they have
an opening, big enough to get in and out, then staple the paper in place.
 
   It's a cheap, quick nuc box.  After time enough for mating we sort it out.
 Mated nucs go into regular hives.  Unmated ones or ones with poor-looking
queens give us back the comb, bees, pollen and honey, before the wax worms
get them.
 
   Maybe this will stimulate the idea mills, and someone will come up with an
even faster and cheaper way (that's the only way to survive in this marginal
business).  I'd love to hear from you.
 
   The cold February weather made Florida's orange bloom very late, which
beekeepers usually like, because it gives the bees time to build up some
more.  I just talked with a Florida b-kpr since I got back home, and he's
afraid it will be a short bloom, as well.   Hmmm - we'll see.  I have bees in
squash, and the grower made a pile of squash until the grove next door began
to bloom.  Then the bees happily flew over the squash to the oranges, much to
the growers consternation.  But a few are still doing squash.
 
[log in to unmask]                                 Dave Green
PO Box 1215, Hemingway, SC    29554