Swarmapalooza!

Top bar hives are easy to open and check on. The bees just go about their business as usual.

As I posted on Reluctant Homesteaders, I had a very easy time capturing my first swarm from top bar hive #1- The Women's Honey Cooperative. I just had to cut through about 50 little blackberry (We call them "Dew Berries" they crawl along the ground and sometimes up) vines since they chose to swarm about a foot above the ground onto a berry covered Scotch Broom bush. I posted this video of the capture and rehiving.

Then hive #1 swarmed again the next afternoon! I think it was because of the rainy weather we had the three preceding days.

The funny thing is that these bees originally came from a twin swarm that happened last June. Do twins run in bee families?

The second swarm was a breeze to catch. It was a lovely day. They landed on a small, eye level branch. Once they finished assembling (I called my brother in law who wanted a swarm, in the meanwhile) I just walked up with my already made, albeit leaky, Bee Box and shook them in.

 This was a defining moment. If I did not get the queen she would most likely fly off to another spot, taking all the bees with her. Here is a group bees that stayed on the branch after I shook the bulk of the swarm into my box. I watched them carefully in case I missed getting the queen. It turned out that they were just being attracted to the leftover scent of the queen. I knew this for sure because the bees in and on the box began "fanning" at the door a few minutes later.

Fanning is when the bees stand at the door and fan with their wings to send out pheromones to let everyone else know that the queen is inside. Soon all the bees in the air and in the small remaining cluster were making a traffic jam at the little door I had cut in the bee box. They all began to pile into the box.
It was a really nice swarm. About three pounds, we all guessed. That's about six or seven thousand bees (2500 to 3000 per pound). I did a little whining about how the swarm I had kept was smaller (about two pounds) and packed them up so that Buck could take them to meet our brother-in-law at the drop off point.

I topped up both Hive #1 and Hive #2 with syrup and a pollen pattie each, to make up for the smallish size of their numbers.

That way they could concentrate on raising brood in hive #1 and building comb for brood in hive #2.

And boy did they get busy in hive #2. I was very impressed with the speed with which they whipped together a full comb and three half combs in just 5 days!

The very best news is that the combs seem to be VERY STRAIGHT!!! I don't dare pull them up yet because of the new wax being very soft and I especially want them to keep moving on with their project of raising brood without interruption.

Hive #2 after 5 days

But I can see pretty well into the hive and the combs look pretty darn straight. Since that was my number one goal with this hive, I feel very relieved that my new style of bar is working.

I was more than a little nervous about that.

Top bars allow you to selectively look into the hive without disturbing the whole hive. Just lift a bar and peek in.

It feels good to be able to observe my bees and improve on their/our environment from those observations. I really think I am gaining so much more knowledge by having a top bar hive, if just by the simple fact that top bar hives can be opened so easily without sending the whole hive into a panic. I can just pick one bar up at a time and peek in, meanwhile all the rest of the bees just keep working away- they have no idea anything is different.

This makes it so that I can not only open the hive and see what they are up to, but I can pull up a chair on a nice day and just sit there watching them at work inside the hive. In fact, they seem to enjoy it when I have the hive open. Worker bees immediately begin using the opening on top to pack out those "team lift" jobs, like giant, dead drones.

I never even need to suit up for these impromptu observations, the bees could care less!