Showing posts with label swarm season. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swarm season. Show all posts

May 25, 2019

When is Swarm Season in the Denver Metro?

This swarm was big enough to need two bee vac boxes.
A Swarm in May is Worth a Load of Hay
Definitely true around here. When the evening news starts reporting bears coming out of hibernation, get your gear ready. When you start seeing swallows playing in the ebb-and-flow of metro intersections, it's high swarm season. Spring was late to arrive this year, so I expect swarms to continue well into June.

May 31, 2013

Update on the Warre Hive: One Becomes Four


Just as flowering maples signal the beginning of the Spring nectar flows, drones signal the beginning of swarming season. I also look for the return of the swallows. This is video from late April or early May, and the season will continue into July.

The hive has swarmed three four times now. The prime swarm was on May 16. John, my hivesitter, said it was a nice healthy size, yet there were still bees left in my hive. He could see them through the window in the bottom box, which they still had not drawn comb into. The swarm of course clustered in one of his tallest trees, yet he managed to capture them and hive them in another Warré hive. In two short weeks, they've just about built out their first box. Excellent!

A second swarm issued on May 29. Just as with the first swarm, they issued after John had replenished their syrup. "There must be a strong nectar flow, gang, let's swarm again!" The parent colony hasn't really recuperated from the first swarm though, and this one was smaller. John said they seemed unsure of their new Warré hive, so the following day I gave him the TBH hive tool, so he could take a comb from the prime swarm colony to anchor them. On my way over, he called and I thought for sure we'd lost them. "Did they just fly off?" I asked. Nope! My hive had just swarmed a third time.

The May 30 swarm was the size of "two softballs." I was maybe 5 minutes away but by the time I got to his house, he'd captured the swarm and brought the mail into the house. That's how easy the capture was. Anyway, we discussed the viability of a dink swarm and settled on a newspaper combine of swarms 2 and 3. I'm hoping that swarm 2 has a mated and laying queen, and assuming that swarm 3 has a virgin. We'll see what happens.