This morning I looked out my window and there were bees coming out of our hive!<\/p>\n
I left one bee box out all winter – it has frames with old comb still on them, sticky with the honey we extracted last summer. I did that in the hope that once sunny spring weather came and the local bees started to swarm, that a swarm would find this hive a nice new home. It looks like it may have worked!<\/p>\n
I heard that if you have a place that bees have made a hive, even though it is vacant, if there is any honeycomb left, another colony with find it the next year. This is a problem when you don’t want the bees in that location, as in my neighbor’s case with his bat box. Colonies of bees have inhabited his bat box up in the tree for three years in a row now.<\/p>\n
So I wasn’t sure if there was a whole colony in our bee box this morning already – and we had missed the swarm, or if the ones I saw at the entrance were just scouts. As it turns out, they were scouts, because later, at about 11am when it was nice and sunny, I heard a buzzing and looked up to see a swirling mass of bees coming over the roof of our house. They went right to the bee box, swarmed around and above it, and in a about 20 minutes most of them were out of the air and inside the box!!<\/p>\n
I think what is safest is if I wait about 10 days to give them a chance to settle and the queen a chance to get started laying her eggs. Then I will open the box to check on them, and add another box or two to give them more room. The nectar flow must be at it’s peak now here in Central California, with all the rain we’ve had, and now the sunny days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I looked out my window and there were bees coming out of our hive! I left one bee box out all winter – it has frames with old comb still on them, sticky with the honey we extracted … Continue reading