Bad decisions and bouncing bee boxes

In my next life, I am going to come back as a person who is good at just leaving well enough alone.  It might keep me out of trouble!

For those of you who have read some of my prior stories, you will know that May is swarm season in Michigan. Swarming is the way that healthy bee colonies reproduce.  During swarming, the queen and about half the bees leave the hive and look for a new place to live, while the bees remaining in the hive raise a new queen.  I spend a lot of time in late April and early May doing hive management with the goal of preventing swarms from my hives, but the bees don’t always cooperate.   In order to help catch swarms, if they do occur, I keep a number of swarm traps around the apiaries.  Swarm traps are basically bait boxes, with old honeycomb in them, meant to attract bees looking to relocate, so that they don’t fly off and move in somewhere they are not wanted.

Earlier this week, while moving wood chips to use in the garden for mulch, I noticed a fair amount of honey bee activity at the swarm trap near the wood chip pile.  Activity at swarm traps can mean that scout bees from swarms are checking them out to see if they would like to relocate there or it can mean that a swarm has decided the accommodations are adequate and moved in.  Often the amount of activity at the box allows you to distinguish the two, but with a modest amount of coming and going from this particular swarm trap, I wasn’t sure which of the two I was seeing.  Since scout bees don’t tend to stay in the traps at night, I visited with a flashlight that evening after dark and peering into the entrance I saw that there were some bees in the box, a good sign that there was a swarm in residence.

At that point, a sensible person would have closed up the swarm trap, so that the next day it could be taken down, and any bees in residence could be moved into a hive. I, on the other hand, remained skeptical about the presence of a swarm in the box. It just didn’t seem busy enough. I have been tricked before, climbing up the ladder to bring down swarm traps only to find no bees in residence. So, instead, I decided to wait until the next day, climb up and take the lid off the swarm trap with it in place, and see how many bees were inside. Given the modest amount of bee activity at the entrance, I was thinking at most I might find a small swarm. Much to my surprise, there were LOTS of bees in the box. Of course, I should have just closed up the lid, waited until dusk, closed the bees in and brought the box down to relocate them to a new home.  But wait, wouldn’t that be just leaving well enough alone? Being me, instead, I decided to bring the box down right then and transfer the bees from the swarm trap into a nucleus (small 5 frame) hive.

As I transferred the frames of bees and comb, thousands of bees launched themselves into the air and started flying excitedly around me.  But this shouldn’t be a problem!  Bees can smell their queen and they are good at finding her, as long as her new location isn’t too far from where they last knew her to be.  I set the hive on the ground right below where the swarm trap had been hanging, with the top open, so the bees could smell their queen.  I thought it was a great plan. The bees didn’t agree.  Thirty minutes later, an ever-growing ball of bees collected on the top of the ladder I had set below the trap to help me bring the box down.  The bees were looking for their queen close to where they had last seen her, oblivious to her new location.  But hey, all I needed to do was to put the nucleus hive closer to where the swarm trap had been, and everything would be perfect, right?  I propped the nucleus hive on top of the ladder where the bees were congregating.  OK, so I admit, it was a bit precarious, so maybe not the best plan I ever made!  To keep the bees safe, I leaned another, taller ladder against the nucleus hive to keep it from tumbling off.

It might have worked perfectly had the new ladder not given the bees a place to congregate that was even closer to where the swarm trap had been.  And, honestly, I am pretty sure it would have worked fine given a little time.  The bees on the ladder were now very close to where the queen was.  They just needed some time to find her.  But not being that person who can leave well enough alone, I decided I should help by shifting the tall ladder so the cluster of bees congregating at the top was closer to the entrance of the nucleus hive.   Only one small problem.  As I tried to move the tall ladder, the nucleus hive tipped off the first ladder, flipped on the way down, lost its lid and hit the ground top down, spilling a huge pile of bees onto the ground, and sending an even larger cloud of bees into the air.   OOPS! 

I am sure you have had moments where you wished you could turn back time and do it all differently, so you know exactly how I was feeling at that moment.  Having expended all my “great plans”, I did the closest thing I could think of to turning back time.   I put the swarm trap back exactly where it had been, ie where the bees clearly knew to look for their queen, and put the frames and any bees remaining on them back into the trap. Hoping desperately that there was a live queen still on those frames, I closed the lid and waited to see what the bees would do.  If I had not killed the queen, and she was back in the swarm trap, her daughters should join her.  Unfortunately, if I had killed or injured their queen, even if they returned to the trap, the bees in the swarm could not survive.  All through the afternoon the bees congregated on the bottom of the trap, showing little interest in going in.  Not a good sign!  Had I doomed a honey bee swarm in my efforts to “help”?   

The only hope was that the fall had simply spilled the queen out, and she was alive and well, but declining to go back into the trap.  Can’t say as I could blame her. In that case, she would be hanging out with the bees on the outside of the trap, while scout bees went looking for a more stable home.  Having nothing more to lose, I decided to take a chance that she was with the bees outside.  If I could get her back into the trap, they should follow her in!  I removed the lid, gently scooped as many bees off the bottom of the box as I could, and dumped them in.  Within 5 minutes, the remainder of the bees hanging outside the box began to calmly file in through the entrance, and 30 minutes later, there were no longer any bees clustered outside.  Success!  Finally, as it got dark, I did what I should have done at the start, closed them safely inside. The next morning I took the trap down and passed it on to a friend in need of bees. She relocated them to a hive far enough from me that they wouldn’t be likely to fly back here. (Bees have amazing ‘GPS’ to return to where they last lived).  Now we wait and see. Until we see baby bees being successfully raised by that colony, we will not know if the queen escaped my misadventure unscathed, but at least I am now cautiously optimistic.