What a spring the bees have been having. After an exceptional winter, with 100% overwinter survival, the honey bees at Green Acres Farm continue to exceed expectations. Or maybe I should say that they have completely disregarded the bee instruction manual. My normal spring routine is to split strong hives in early May, as swarm season approaches This prevents swarms. It is a strategy I have used for many years, and it has worked very well for me. I am basically doing for the bees what they do when they swarm, removing the queen and a portion of the hive population to a new hive at a new location, giving everyone more room, and allowing the bees at the original hive to raise a new queen. To deal with what to do with the new hives generated by doing splits, I arranged to sell some bees, and also found a few new locations to host hives, in order to place splits where they had access to forage beyond the reach of the bees at the farm.
During early May, the bees needed a lot of time and attention, but by mid May, I had split all but the 5 smallest over wintered hives. I thought I could probably take those hives into honey production without needing to split them. I breathed a sigh of relief. Now things would slow down, and I should be able to catch my breath, and attend to some other farm chores. My vegetable garden was lagging behind due to my focus on the bees and was badly in need of my attention. Then my bees decided otherwise. On routine hive inspections the 3rd week in May, I found the bees in 2 of those smaller overwintered hives were making swarm cells, ie preparing a new queen so that they could swarm. If you have seen my story about swarm season, you know that once bees decide to swarm, they are very hard to discourage! So, I scrambled to pull together two new hives, and split those two colonies. Then I found that 2 of my earliest splits were raising swarm cells. In other words, the bees I had taken through a controlled “swarm” were getting ready to swarm again. That has never happened to me before!!!! I split those bees (again) as well. How odd, I thought. The next week two more of my early splits were doing the same thing. I split one but I had no boxes with me to split the other, and it was starting to rain. With no other option a that moment, I removed the 4 or 5 swarm cells they were working on. Without a queen in progress, the bees won’t swarm, so by removing the cells I was at a minimum buying myself some time. And it was nearing the end of swarm season, so maybe, just maybe I could discourage them from swarming. Five days later I checked on them. The bees had built back between 15 and 20 swarms cells. In addition, the other early split right next to them now had a dozen or more swarm cells as well. It seemed pretty clear that those bees were committed to swarm. This time, having recognized a pattern, I had come prepared with boxes and was able to split both of those hives. What a month. Over the course of last two weeks of May, 5 hives I had originally split into 10 had become 15, and two hives I had not intended to split at all had become 4. I was over flowing bees! And I literally had nothing more to move any splits into. So later that week, when two more of the splits started building swarm cells, I cut the cells out, and crossed my fingers. Six days later, although both had rebuilt swarm cells, they had only made a few, so I removed the cells again. This week, one seems to have given up, and the other had only one swarm cell. So maybe we are now far enough past the peak of swarm season that they will settle down, stop making swarm cells, and stay put. I hope! I REALLY don’t want any more bees!
What caused the bees to completely disregard prior behavior and try to swarm again so soon after having “swarmed”? I asked the bees but they are not talking! I do have my own theory. It was such an unusual spring, staying cool for much longer than normal followed immediately by very warm weather. The prolonged cool delayed the arrival of much of the early spring forage. In fact, I lost a hive, one of my splits, in early May. It was a rather spectacular death, with pretty much the whole hive of bees, thousands of them, dead in a pile on the bottom of the hive and on the ground in front of it. Because I was worried about a pesticide kill, I communicated with the experts at MSU, who felt strongly that the hive had likely starved. I have NEVER had bees starve in May before! Then, following that cool weather, when we moved immediately to very warms days, with highs in the high 80s, the flowers went crazy! All the things that were late starting to bloom came into flower in quick succession, and then some of the late May and early June flowers started to bloom early. I can’t help but think that the bees, faced with an overwhelming abundance of forage, thought “What the heck, with all this food, why not reproduce AGAIN!”
After all the splitting, it was possible I would significantly delayed my honey harvest. Once a hive is split, I must let the bees build back their own reserves before I can start taking honey, However, that same forage abundance has resulted in a very nice nectar flow, allowing the bees to build back and make honey quickly. So today, I was able to start my first honey harvest, two weeks EARLIER than my first harvest last year. So much for time to catch my breath, LOL! But if I had to pick problems to have, too many healthy bees definitely beats dead hives! And who can complain about a jump on spring honey! YUM! Once I have it out of the hives, I have to get it into bottles, but I should have honey to share with all of you soon!