Plain Talk: A Small June Swarm

Episode 184 – Plain Talk: A Small June Swarm

Jim Tew: Hello listeners, it's podcast time of the week again. I was thinking just a couple of days ago as I was honestly trying to come up for a segment topic that beekeeping isn't really a single entity. It's a myriad of tasks and jobs and assignments and procedures and needs and techniques and suggestions. That all comes together under this banner that we call beekeeping. Now of all that morass, in June, late that it's getting, I want to talk to you about some swarming behavior that intrigues me because swarming is one of those tasks and assignments that I enjoy. I'm Jim Tew and I come to you once a week here at  Honey Bee Obscura where I talk about some aspect of beekeeping for just a short time.

Introduction: Welcome to  Honey Bee Obscura brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the  Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: The point that I was trying to make in the introduction is that extracting honey isn't the same thing as treating for Varroa and treating Varroa is not the same thing as assembling frames. Assembling frames is not the same thing as having a swarm and having a swarm, you get it, don't you? All of these jobs come together to be this concept that we call beekeeping. Everybody else who's not a beekeeper thinks that we spend all our time in a hive, tinkering, worrying, looking at bees, wearing those strange clothes and with that smoke thing going on. That's really a small part of what we do.

Listeners, out of all these tasks, some of which I really enjoy, and I got to tell you, there are some of these tasks I don't care for at all. Cleaning up winter kills, that is not out of my list. Out of all these tasks, one of the things I really enjoy and I'm intrigued by so long as I am winning is swarming and swarm behavior. It always instills a sense of wonderment after all these decades that I've been keeping bees. I still get excited by swarms. I'm still discouraged when I lose one. I'm still ecstatic when I pick one up.

All of my childhood type beekeeper emotions are right there, ready to be reactivated. I've gotten to a point now in life, I don't want you to think badly of me, but I've gotten to a point where I'm not the young, live, energetic, eager beekeeper I once was. Now I'm quiet, cautious, slow, and selective. I no longer want hundreds and hundreds of colonies. I want a few and I want them to be manageable so I can photograph them and enjoy them.

When I have winter kills, which is anywhere around 20 to 25, sometimes 30%, in the old days I was scraping clean. These days now, I leave it there most of the time. Now I know where I live here in Northeast Ohio that I've got to do something with those empty, unprotected combs. Starting right about now, I'm talking to you about the middle of June, that wax moths are going to go crazy on this comb if I don't do something. Now, if I were still keeping bees in Alabama, it's a year-round thing. You got to be watching for wax moths all the time.

When I have these winter kills, I know that I have a window of what? Laziness? Sloppiness? Where I don't have to be right out there just the time that colony passes away, cleaning it up, scraping, and getting it restored. I've got time. Beekeepers, while I was doing that, starting about four or five years ago, I would have a swarm or two or three move into that dead-out equipment. Then they would take over the task of cleaning up that colony, that hive, and bringing it back up to specifications. That was just fine with me. That was an onerous task anyway.

Now I got the bees, these swarm bees working like crazy bees, cleaning up this equipment that I don't have to do. Honestly, they're much better at it than I am. There's that. I'm not saying that this should be a recommendation. I'm saying clearly for all you folks in warmer climates, I don't know that you have that much of a window to sit around waiting for swarms to move in because I think you'll be getting wax moths before you get swarms, meaningful wax moth populations.

This is more of a conversation than a recommendation. All right, let the bees, if you get a swarm, do the work. Then I begin to want swarms. I begin to leave equipment there on purpose. This only started about five years ago. I'm not sure what happened five years ago, but something triggered and I crossed some Rubicon and I began to get, I want to say efficient. You're probably going to say sloppy. The second thing I noticed is that when, for whatever reason, some of that equipment would not have the full compliment of frames, when a swarm moved in, they went to that empty cavity.

Isn't that weird? Now, this is not science and this may be absolutely nothing, but on three separate occasions, I've had swarms go directly to that empty cavity when they had access to about 15 frames and 15 combs and they would start all over again. I wondered, is that box and those odors of those old comb attractive? Then do they want to rebuild their own comb? I have no idea if that's right, but if that is correct, I find that to be extremely interesting, that they've got all that work already done, all that comb already built, and yet they choose to go through at about eight pounds of honey per one pound of wax, a very expensive building material for them to build a new comb when they got all that old comb there.

Now, before we get all happy about this and just marvel at it, I may be 100% wrong. My plan was to always have a cavity in the middle, usually two deeps. I was going to have a cavity in the middle of the upper deep, four to five frames empty. I had good intentions, but most of the time, before I'd get out there and break open this stinky dead hive, if you're going to get a swarm, it would already be in there. That whole window of opportunity passed because in my "Efficient form of beekeeping," I didn't get out there in time enough to take out those frames. There's too many other beekeeping things to be done.

As the last few years have passed, I really want those swarms. I don't know where they're coming from. The most logical place they'd be coming from is from my bees, but I certainly can't tell it. I can't miss, surely at some point, but would a swarm issue and then just go right next door and do that naturally? The question that I can't answer is, does a swarm seemingly have some distance requirement? The reason we have apple pulp is so deer and humans and all the rest of us will eat apples and disseminate the seed, or otherwise all the apple trees are growing up under the mother tree.

In a way, that swarming hive is a mother hive. If a swarm just goes right next door, then they are immediately mortal competitors. Just in a few weeks, they will easily and readily kill each other. Would I suspect that these swarming bees want to move further away? I don't know, listeners, I don't know. The reason I'm wondering all this as I stand there thinking instead of working is am I picking up my own swarms or are these swarms from somewhere else? I got to go tell you, if they're swarms from somewhere else for the last five years, they have really been dependable. Now, this may be the last time I'll pick up swarms, but I've really become addicted to these swarms, free bees, being so entertaining every year. I got to go continue to get my thoughts together. Let's take a break and hear from our sponsor. I'll be right back.

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Jim: The swarm thing is completely unpredictable. As I became addicted to free bees doing my winter cleanup work for me, I would stand there and watch bees working around empty equipment. Listeners, it opened yet another avenue of unanswered questions for me. I've been boasting this is my 50th year of beekeeping. I thought it was neat that I'm 75 and I've been keeping bees 50 years. Something about those numbers seemed to be, "Oh, my stars, this is a glory year." Most of the time this year, all I've been shown by the bees is that you don't know nearly as much as you thought you did.

I'd stand there looking at those bees and I've talked to you in past segments. I went through a session and I'm still not out of it where I was completely intrigued by robbing and robbing behavior. I've been forced to realize I can't tell the difference dependably in a robber and in a scout bee. One of my unanswered questions is, can you have both bees at a site, empty equipment, winter kill, whatever, can you have both bees nosing around, the robber looking for free food and the scout looking for a home site or even more confusing listeners, can the same bee be doing both jobs?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've told beekeepers hundreds of times that robbers are furtive, they dart, they dash, they're crazy, they try to get at all the wrong entrances. I'm not talking about that kind of robbing. I'm talking about a few hundred bees coming and going, fighting in the wrong entrance. I would ask myself, is I hope that scouts because to be robbers, they're not rushing right in. They're standing on the outside, they're walking back and forth, they're going in the equipment and they're coming right back out. I wanted to believe that they were scouts.

I began to tell myself, "Yes, those are scouts. You're on the way to getting some free bees." Then it's directly akin to fishing. When I was a kid, you just sit there and watch that cork and wait for one of those fish to take the bait, except in a bee yard, you stand there and you watch those bees, you hope that they're scout bees, and you hope that back in their home hive, they're able to sell this site as a great community and a great property investment. I go out twice a day, every day. I used to go out three. I'm trying to get my steps in.

I go out twice a day, at least, especially on days that you think that swarming could have issued. Maybe in the last five years, anywhere from 7 to maybe no more than 10 times, there's not one there in the morning and there's a swarm there in the afternoon. You think, "Wow, all that commotion, all that fanfare, all that bee drama, and I didn't notice it." Now, I have noticed it in the past and I don't have enough time to go into it, but it's the most wonderful thing I've ever seen. I cannot get off the subject about swarms in the air and swarms landing and swarms leaving.

That is not what I'm trying to talk about here. Maybe some other time. What I'm trying to figure out now is, is this a scout bee, is this a robber bee? Is it robbing? Is the scout going to bring the colony here? Once they're there, are the robbers evicted? At times, after it looks like the swarm has moved in, why wouldn't I know for sure? Because all swarms aren't huge. Sometimes they can be strangely small. Now, if it's a big swarm, I suspect they're bullies and the robbers give up immediately and cede the territory.

At some point, the robbers are gone and the new colony is there and it takes over the situation. I've had one happen like that. I got my grandson involved in it. It was a much, much bigger colony than I realized. It was just a swarm a few months ago and it suddenly turned into a boomer hive and I didn't know that. I exposed a rookie beekeeper to far too many bees. At the same time, a much more agreeable smaller swarm came in. I watched them for two weeks do that tantalizing thing where the cork bobbles but it doesn't go under.

A lot of activity here, a lot of curiosity here and then one day, kaboom, they're there. There was no activity in the morning to speak of and the afternoon, there's clearly a small swarm that moved in. I had my son-in-law open it up. I mentioned this in an article. I think I even mentioned it somewhere in a podcast that I'm right on schedule. I'm picking up some bees. I wish it'd been a bigger swarm. I'll take whatever I can get. Had my grandson help me open it up and apparently those few hundred bees on the front was all there was there.

I had to eat crow and tell my grandson, the listeners, and the readers, I blew that one. It looked like a swarm. I don't know what these bees are doing and then we busted it up. We set the equipment up because now I am going to have wax moth issues and so I set the equipment on end that I do back here because that seems to really limit wax moth invasions in my yard to have the equipment exposed to light and air. I just set it up on its end, stacked the equipment that way.

There was that. We broke it apart. We closed everything up. There was bees flying everywhere. I came back the next day after my grandson and everything was over, done and gone and there was a lot of confusion around the one hive that remained there and I thought, "That really looks like a lost swarm." Or you want to say, "Well, it's play flights." If you don't know what play flights are, listeners, go look it up. I'm giving out of time here. I want to end on this note and begin to wind down. I gave up on it. I didn't know what was going on.

A few days later, like four, I went out and there was a tiny swarm in some terrible equipment that was mostly wax moth destroyed and after thinking that I must have had a mating swarm because it wasn't robbers that I thought was already inside the colony, it must have been a little swarm clustered there or not. I don't know what it was, but then mysteriously, there's a small swarm and a couple of boxes that are really in bad shape and they were working their little bee tails off, trying to pull out old wax moth cocoons and whatever.

Just to be better prepared this time before I shot myself in my bee foot again, I just went out an hour ago and opened that colony. There's a brand new queen there. I like the way she looks healthy and wholesome, no frayed wings, all her body hair is there. I want to believe that that was a virgin queen and that I caused all kinds of havoc breaking up that little cluster on the outside of the colony, thinking that it was just bees that hadn't gone in yet. They really had a nice little compact brood nest on three of about four frames that they had partially cleared of wax moths.

I found myself being a beekeeper again. I didn't even use smoke. I didn't use gloves. There's not enough bees there to really do anything. This was a point where these bees need a beekeeper. They need to be fed. They need a pollen substitute. Probably right now the mite load is light since they've just swarmed. They need my help. Those other big colonies back there, they don't need me at all. I have really enjoyed this swarming thing. This is just one of a multitude of swarm stories that's happened as I tinkered with this trap concept of luring swarms here.

If I can keep this little three frame colony and each frame's about half full, if I can keep it alive, I will certainly give you an update. Probably whether or not you want it. I hope you know I always enjoy talking to you. I love to talk about bees. Hey, thank you so much for listening. Until next week, I'm Jim telling you bye.

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