Dave (Pollinator) and I have been greatly blessed this spring with bees
that have for the most part been healthy and strong.  We have seen a few of
our bees go up in swarms, but more often than not, we caught them just before
swarming and had plenty of queen cells for making splits and requeening
hives, etc.  I have been constantly learning new things since meeting Dave
less than a year ago, and am continually marveling over these unique fuzzy
creatures.
 
   Today was another of those days to marvel over.  We were blessed with a
new swarm from out of the blue--it flew in from the swamp and made its home
beside our warehouse in a stack of deep supers.  The cloud of bees seemed to
settle in, but for some reason stayed outside the supers running up and down
the sides.  The swarm was quite large.  Dave and I were working inside the
warehouse and I was about to turn on the shop vac to sweep up some dead bees
that had died on the floor when one bee caught my attention.  It was a queen
bee crawling around all by itself--there was not a single worker bee around
her!  I called Dave and he determined that it was an old queen bee.  He
carried her outside and put her on top of the stack of supers and watched
until she finally crawled down between the frames.  Before long nearly all
the bees were inside the deep supers.
 
   About an hour later we were getting in the truck to leave when Dave
noticed a very small cluster of bees on the ground.  We looked to see if
there was a queen in the cluster and found her.  She looked remarkably like
the queen we had seen previously?? We put a nuc box down beside the bees and
they immediately crawled inside.  I am eager to check in the morning and see
what is happening with these bees.  Were there two queens in the same swarm?
 Do we have a highly disoriented queen that doesn't stay with her hive?
 Perhaps she flew into one of the burning light bulbs inside the warehouse???
 Maybe she missed too many days of queen bee school and never finished
reading the book about how queen bees are supposed to behave...?
 
According to Dave, it is well past the end of the normal swarm period.  We do
not have any idea where these bees came from as we moved all our bees far
away from the warehouse to prevent them from robbing our supers of honey as
waiting to be extracted.  It would be great if we have a mite resistant
swarm--IF the queen makes it.  The bees appear healthy and we couldn't spot
any varroas.
 
Janice Green   PO Box 1200,  Hemingway,  SC      29554
 
Practical Pollination Home Page            Dave & Janice Green
http://users.aol.com/pollinator/polpage1.html
 
Note:  We are excitedly awaiting the delivery of our "Snappy" which should
enable us to put lots of pictures on our home page.  :  )   Be watching for
the improvements.