They can be yours, someone else’s or ferals. Swarming is how they reproduce hives to repopulate areas with bees.
Most beekeepers try to keep they’re own hives from swarming by giving them extra hive space or splitting big hives into smaller hives but bees do what bees want so if they want to...
Bill, the short answer is yes. All it takes is a box with some frames. I use old frames in old deep boxes. Bees tend to move into places bees lived before. If you don’t have any old frames you can use new ones and add a q-tip soaked in lemongrass oil. There’s tons of info out there on catching...
I finally got my first confirmed swarm. Looks like they moved into a stack of empty boxes in the bee yard. About every 3rd or 4th bee was brining pollen in. Now I’ll just have to rearrange the stack . Gott love the ones you don’t have to transport.
Bill that’s a swarm. They do that when they leave the original hive to start a new colony. They’ll stay like that until some scouts find a suitable spot to start a new hive. Catching them is quite easy either knock into a bucket/box or put a old hive box next to them and they’ll walk right in
I started my habit journey on a double lot in town. At the time I couldn’t live in the country so I brought the country to town through small ponds, pollinator gardens along with bird bat boxes. When we moved to our current home in the woods I just carpet bombed my yard with boxes and as I...
I have the dozen or so boxes here at the house cleaned out and ready to go. We've had a couple of males singing for the last week. Typically we don’t have a singers around here until the 2/3 week of March.
This weekend I plan on running my road line which has another 2 dozen boxes for clean out...
I’ve just used a piece of antler. The smell was bad enough with just doing that. I would say cutting scales would be worse. This was my old filet knife I use for butchering
Managed to get a bunch little projects hammered out on this very mild 1st weekend in February. Walked the 4wheeler path around the property cleaning up branches and trees that came down in the last month or so. Cleaned out all the bluebird boxes(12+) here at home but still need to do the 2...
Was a nice day here in the upper 40s. The girls were flying and it looks like 5 of 7 have made it so far.
It was nice to see the survival rate so far but kinda disappointing seeing them break cluster this time of the year when the next 45-60 days are the hardest part of the winter. Hopefully...