Beefolks:


I captured my first swarm of this season today, a small secondary swarm
that covers only two ottn’ pickn’ frames.  [Sometimes I wonder if my
collecting swarm is worth the trouble, after all]  The cluster was located
at about twenty feet up on a limb, the virgin queen, as usual playing hard
to get; the bees kept inching up higher in each retrieval process.
Setting up a ladder on my truck bed, I was able to capture the swarm
inside this  five-frame, cardboard-nuc-box-swarm-trap I had bought from a
dealer, repeating, after each retrieval, the process of squirting water as
much as the cluster would hold to flop it down into a bucket.

However, once I got the queen and the bees inside that cardboard box, they
soon moved back out onto the same limb probably because the small five-
frame box I had placed in the shade got heated up too quickly despite its
wire-mesh vent holes on both ends, or they thought it was too small for
their liking, or Feng Shui, or because I was wearing a pair of shorts and
wrong underwear, or the occult mumbo jumbo—-although inside the box I had
four foundation and one drawn comb.  Or they were just trying to teach me
the Murphy’s Law.

Two days ago, a home-owner frantically called me to report numerous bees
flying about her house: this must have been the primary swarm taking off
although she was not aware.  It could have been a good-size swarm, the
fish that got away, considering that her front-yard tree colony has
allegedly lived there far longer than a decade.  Since she *insisted* that
the bees had not left yet, I left a full-size bait box in her backyard,
against my better judgment.

Later when they took off back to the same limb, I had to do it all over
again: dousing and flopping.  I had to repeat this process at least three
times until I got about two thirds of the initial cluster before the
automatic-retrieval machinery took off as more number of bees frantically
fanned their tails [Nasanov] off at the entrance.  The stronger the
pheromone, the quicker the action, obviously.  [The bees would not come
down as if they had, as they wont to, another queen in the half cluster
remaining on the limb when only a handful of them fanned]  But I was not
about to give up.  Standing on the six-foot ladder, set up atop on the
pick-up bed, I worried I could, if I faltered—-the bucket and the broom
stick and all—-easily break my neck or back for this worthless number.
Since this swarm was the first of the season, I persevered and captured
it, brought it home, put in a brand new deep, and gave a gallon of syrup;
instantly, they were busy bubbling up the jar.  Given the trouble the
virgin queen had given me, I put down a queen excluder under the BC above
the bottom just in case; however, I wondered, if she is really a virgin,
she needs too get out to do the deed, and the archival consensus is that
*probably* a virgin queen could get through the QE.

Questions: Do you have any experience of losing a secondary or later
swarms in spite of your placing a QE under the BC?  It is well-documented
that a virgin queen is just that, a virgin queen.  Is this true in all
cases?  If she is newly minted and unmated and slim and beautifully
anorexic, could she not go through the QE with no trouble at all as we
sometimes observe?  This last point seems to question the very practice we
do—-the QE under the BC—-especially for the secondary or later swarms.
If I leave the QE on, could she still be able to climb back up after
mating?  I do understand that the size of her ovary will NOT get any
bigger after mating, however.


Yoon

Shawnee, OK

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