My Carniolan bee hive was started from a
package in late spring.  It has 2 hive bodies
and three supers and a tank feeder on top.

Saturday I looked out the back door and found
the bees milling around in the air above the
hive. Not spiraling up above the house and
bee-lining away towards whatever flowers they
were feeding on.

I left to drop my laundry off and came back
15 minutes later. Looked in the back yard
and the bee milling was much reduced: just a
few bees flying about.  Sixty feet up in the
Silver Maple in the back yard was a a dark
mass that looked like a giant brown slug
stretched along a slim limb so high that I
wasn't about to climb up there and confirm
that it was the bees.

I assumed the bees had swarmed.

I built a makeshift "bait" hive
next to the "old" hive. kludged together from
what I had on hand: two supers and two empty
nucs. I emptied one of the supers and put the
frames, five each, sprayed with sugar water,
into the two nucs. Of course the super frames
only went down into the nucs about half way, but I didn't have any full size
frames so I figured
they were better then nothing. I used the empty
super as a makeshift hive stand, putting a board
on top of it, then putting the two nucs side by side on top of it. I put the
remaining super on top of the two nucs and then put a sheet of newspaper on
top of the frames followed by the two narrow tops left over from the nucs that
were lower down.  I realize this was probably not the ideal way to set up a
bait hive, but I was trying to make do with the materials at hand.

I had many chores to do that afternoon to get ready for the NYC Century bike
ride so I left to
take care of them.  When I came home after dark
the bees were back in the hive, judging from
the mass of bees hanging out on the front face
of the "old" hive.

The next day my bike was stolen of the front
sidewalk when I went back inside to turn of the
lights on Sunday morning at 5 AM after I had
finished loading it up with drinks, food, ATM
cards, cash, tools etc. so I spent the day
dealing with police & banks etc instead of going on the ride which I had been
training for months.

Consequently I was home to see the bees do the
same drill as on Saturday: run away to their
favorite tree limb and come back to the hive
at night.

Tomorrow is Monday and I should go to work
but I may take a "mental health day" to deal
with the insurance company, get a new ATM card,
and start the work on getting a replacement
SS card and drivers license.

Any comments or suggestions about the
bee-havior of the honeys?
Dennis-aka Paul D. Law

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