It's Time to make SWARM LURE

 Years ago in 2007, an Italian beekeeper shared his swarm lure recipe with me and I have made it every year since. In a good bee year, it's amazingly effective. I have just put it on my empty hives at the community garden and on my top bar hive which is empty of bees. 

Next week is March and in Atlanta, that often marks the beginning of swarm season. I have drones flying in all of my hives, so I made swarm lure this week, like a good "be prepared" Girl Scout.

Here's the easy to follow recipe:

1 square inch cube of beeswax

1/4 cup of oil - olive oil was in his recipe but he's in Italy - any relatively no-smell oil will do

12 - 20 drops of lemongrass essential oil

Put the first two ingredients in a glass jar (small jelly jar) and set the jar in a small pan of hot water. Heat until wax is fully melted. I stir with a chop stick and remove the jar from the water. I use a jar lifter which I have for making apple butter. 

Let it cool only slightly and then stir in the lemongrass oil.

As the mixture cools, it will become solid but smeary. If your cubes are larger than 1X1 inch, use more oil. You want the concoction to be soft enough to smear. Sometimes I carry a chopstick to scoop out some of the harder versions of my lure before smearing it on the hive.

How to use this fabulous attractant?

• Smear it around the center hole in the inner cover.
• Smear it on some of the frames in the top box on the hive
• Smear it on the underside of the top of the entrance to the hive (if you smear it on the bottom, the bees feet will stick and get goopy so just on the top of the entrance.

For photos and a previous post about this lure, click here.

This post shows where and how to smear the lure. 

Time to Bait Hives with SWARM LURE

 Yesterday I baited every empty hive I have in hopes that this year bees will find me, as they do most years. Here's the recipe for almost-never-fail swarm lure:

1 square inch cube of beeswas

1/4 cup olive oil

15 - 20 drops of lemongrass oil.

Put the oil in a glass container and drop in the beeswax cube:

I make the lure in the container that I will put in my hive tool kit.

If it needs stirring, I use a tongue depressor or a chopstick.

Let it cool a bit before adding the lemongrass oil so it doesn't immediately evaporate. I have my container sitting on a piece of marble which cools it off quickly. After 3 - 4 minutes, then I add the lemongrass oil.

Now smear it on the hive at the upper edge of the entrance, around the inner cover, and on the tops of a few frames. 

And wait for scout bees to find your hive and entice their sisters to move in!

Here's how to apply the swarm lure for greatest effectiveness.

It's Swarm Trap Time - Time for Traps and Swarm Lure

We are having a much warmer time earlier this year than normal and bees are considering swarming. I want to be ready so last weekend I set up three swarm traps.

My nuc which was a thriving hive, died in early winter because I didn't feed it. I had started feeding it but then I fell in October and didn't do anything for the hives after that. This huge nuc died and it made me ill to see all the dead bees. And to see the two empty bottles of food inside the top nuc box.

 

The last little bit of honey was consumed by the bees. They are head down in the cells as bees are when they starve. The rest of the bees lay dead in the bottom of the nuc box.

I was a neglectful beekeeper - injury is a decent excuse, but I could have gotten someone else to feed them.

So I took that nuc box, smelling of bee (which is often seductive to a swarm looking for a home), cleaned it out (dumped out the dead bees) and set the nuc up as a swarm trap.

At our GBA spring meeting on the 18th, I heard a really good talk by GBA member Paul Berry about the tons of swarms he caught last year (I think the number was 48!). He prefers nuc boxes as swarm traps. Since this is a medium nuc box, I put two boxes on the bottom board to intrigue the scout bees.

My house is built into a hill and my backyard is considerably lower than the street. So I arranged two other nuc boxes as swarm traps on my deck to attract either my own bees swarming or some from the many neighborhood beekeepers.

As you can see, I have jammed the entry of the nuc box up against the slats of the deck rails. I'm feeling a bit like Winnie the Pooh and am hoping that the bees will think these boxes are in a tree.

I did several things to make these swarm traps attractive. I put frames in the hive that were old frames and smelled nice and bee-ie. In the deep nuc boxes I put medium frames because I use all medium boxes. If I catch a swarm I wanted to move it to a medium box as easily as possible and the medium frames will facilitate that. 

Finally I mixed up swarm lure. I don't think it's easy to find the recipe on my blog anymore since Google disabled Picasa web albums so I took photos the other day as I made more and here they are:

One square inch of beeswax in 1/4 cup olive oil, poured into a jelly jar and heated in a hot water bath on the stove.

Melting happens faster if you stir - I use a tongue depressor.

When it has cooled slightly, add 15 - 20 drops of lemongrass essential oil (the bees love it and the olive oil/beeswax mix makes it last longer in the hive).

Pour it into some kind of container. It will solidify into a sort of lotion/ointment. Take it to the swarm traps and smear it. I smeared lure under the top edge of the entry and on the tops of the frames in the box. I also smeared some swarm lure around the hole in the inner cover.

Now I get to watch for a swarm to arrive!

A Swarm by Invitation

When spring arrived, I had one hive alive at my friend Tom's house. The other, which had lived through the previous winter, had died. I had a lot of hope in those bees, had thought they were survivors and would outlast the attacks of varroa mite-vectored viruses, but that was not to be.

When I first went to check on the living hive, I took some swarm lure with me. The front hive was a sort of patched together split that I did last year. The bottom box was a deep. Four years ago I bought two hives from Bill Owens in the MABA auction. I picked them up in October. He required that they be in a deep hive box, so I complied and bought two deeps - one for each.

At home I mostly have mediums. I do have one or two hives on deep bottoms but mostly I like all mediums. So when that front hive died after its second winter, I wanted to fill it with a split from Bill Owens' daughter hives at my house. I brought medium frames of brood and eggs and a couple of empty deep frames (to accommodate the box) and made a split into the deep at Tom's house. Consequently now that hive has some really wonky frames in the bottom box. At least two of them are mediums with bottoms extended of wax and brood.

Side note: In most people's hives, if you put a medium frame in a deep box, the bees use the free space to build drone brood because they are desperate to find places to put drone brood when they are on foundation (designed for worker comb). But when bees have foundationless frames, they build drone comb wherever they want to. So in my hives, the extension below the medium frame is always used for the bees for worker brood, just extending the worker brood area in the medium wooden part of the frame.

Indeed at Tom's house, the front hive was thriving. He took these photos. So I took out the second frame from the box and it was a medium with comb below and I don't know how it happened, but I dropped it!

It was a complete mess. Lots of lost brood and bees and sticky honey everywhere. I was so embarrassed because Tom was filming as we worked!

Here is a beautiful bee he shot afterward as well as a crew of cleanup bees.

You can see larvae on the top as well as spilled honey.

So after that mess, I looked at the empty hive that had died and decided to set it up as a swarm lure hive. I put swarm lure under the entry and around the inner cover and lo and behold, bees had moved in by the time I returned about 12 days later.

It's nice to invite a swarm and have them take you up on the invitation!

Jeff and I checked those bees about a week after they moved in and there were queen cells as well as eggs and brood. We decided that maybe the swarm that moved in was with a virgin queen who hadn't mated well so they were superseding her.

We'll see what happens. They looked OK this week but I'm not sure there is a laying queen. There was capped brood but I didn't see young larvae or eggs. This may be while the new queen is mating. If there are no signs of a laying queen next week, then I'll add a frame of brood and eggs every week until they successfully have a laying queen.

To my disappointment, neither hive had the need for another super. My hives at home are growing exponentially and I expected these hives to be needing more room as well, but it was not the case.

Spring Report on Rabun County Bees

On Sunday I drove up to Rabun County just for the day to check on the bees there.  I took Hannah, my dog, with me.  Hannah had a delightful time - she is a dog to whom rules do not apply: she sleeps on my bed; sits on the furniture; and loves to run off-leash on trails with stern signs at the beginning:  ALL DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH.

When we go to the community garden in Rabun County, I let her run free out of the car.  While I am checking bees, she is racing up and down the creek banks and running through the water.  She had fun.  I did not.














I found no bees in the remaining Rabun hive.  The first Rabun hive was dead before winter and someone/something destroyed the equipment.  The remaining Rabun hive was populated by a swarm last spring and the bees were still going strong in December.  Now, however, there are no bees.  They left the hive full of honey.   On the top of the slatted rack were dead hive beetles.

On the screened bottom board were less than 20 dead bees.

I brought the honey home and crushed it to feed to the new hives.  I hope there isn't anything wrong with the honey but I assume with honey's antiseptic qualities that the risk of the honey being OK is pretty high.

The only frame I could find with any brood looked like this:

I feel a need to explain that my brood comb typically doesn't look this dark and dirty.  I usually replace it every year, but a swarm moved into this hive with old comb before I knew they were there, so the hive didn't get its usual culling out of comb previous to spring.

Even with the SHB on the slatted racks, the honey had not been slimed.  I brought home six frames of honey that tasted like kudzu.

I put the hive back together and left it as a 2 box hive.  I smeared swarm lure (olive oil, beeswax and lemongrass oil) on the landing, under the inner cover and in several other places.  Maybe the feral hive in the wall of the abandoned school nearby will send a swarm my way.

Meanwhile, I'll make several nucs in Atlanta with the idea of taking one of them up to Rabun to have bees there this year.  My sweet friend, Julia, gave me a frame with at least one queen cell on it to do just that.  I added frames from the Morningside apiary to make the nuc and if it succeeds, I'll take it to Rabun County.

First Hive Openings of 2013

Today I came home from a mountain site visit for a professional conference, immediately donned my bee gear and headed for the bee hives.  We've had such rain in Atlanta and finally today was sunny and a temperature when I could open the hives.  It was a mixed experience.

In my own backyard, I opened the first hive which was small going into winter.  It was housed in two boxes but really only needed one.  There was still a little honey on the hive.

This is a small group of bees but the queen is laying.  At first I only found spotty brood so she may have some problems.  I did find further frames with more solid brood on them, though.

I decided to treat this hive more like a nuc and left it in a single box.  I'll check next week and maybe either combine it with another or give it more resources from another hive.

Originally my plan was to give this hive some frames of brood and eggs from the very strong hive next to it (the only other hive in my own yard).

I opened the hive next to it and found it boiling over with bees:

When I looked through the hive, I found it to be full of honey and I found frames where they are obviously bringing in new nectar (I saw this in several hives today).  I don't know where they are getting it at this February date, but they are finding nectar somewhere.

But then my heart sank when I pulled the first frame with brood on it.  Only drone brood and tons of it - three frames that looked like this:

I looked through the entire hive and did not find ANY worker brood.  This probably means the queen who was new last year was probably "short-bred" to use a Keith Fielder term.  That means that she didn't get enough mating before she was placed in the nuc and thus couldn't make more worker brood.

Queens need to fly out several times sometimes to get fully mated or when they are in the air, they need to mate with up to 17 or so drones.  This one may not have gotten that opportunity.

The bees are everywhere in this hive.  I don't know how to make sense of this unless 21 days ago, her sperm ran out.  It's also possible that I couldn't see eggs in other frames since it was about 4:00 and the sun was not in a position to allow me to get a good view, but this was my strongest looking hive at this point, so I was really upset by what I found.

Originally I had planned to take a frame of what I thought would be plentiful brood and eggs from this hive to put in the small hive next door, but that was not to be.

Then I went to Sebastian's house where I found a lovely surprise.  This hive was doing well.  I didn't spend a lot of time in the hive because as soon as I knew it was OK, my instinct was to close it up.  I saw the queen and was happy.  She still had her yellow paint dot, though quite worn, on her thorax.

As you can see, this frame is full of nectar.  I was so pleased to see this.

I left Sebastian's and rushed down Piedmont to the Stonehurst Place Inn to check on those hives.

There are three hives there, although one box is empty and has been since right before harvest when the largest hive was robbed out and died.  I left one box there as a swarm lure.  The two that are left include one strong hive and one that doesn't look too great.

I opened up the weak one first.  I found only two deep frames of bees (these hives were purchased nucs last year).  The hive appeared queenless.  Oddly there was a full super of honey on the top and more honey in the second box although it wasn't full.  The bottom box was full of equal amounts of hive beetles and bees.  (Odd that the beetles weren't in the honey).  The bees looked pitiful.  The brood I didn't get pictures of, but it was scattered and looked old.  I think the hive is queenless.  I took a frame of brood and eggs from the stronger hive and put it into this hive to give them a chance to make a queen, but I really have my doubts.

The strong hive looked great.  Good brood, lots of it and frames of pollen and nectar.  This hive is a keeper.  I took a frame of honey out of the weak hive to put in a frame of brood and eggs from the strong hive. Since I don't know if those bees are just weak from queenlessness or because they are ill, I brought the honey home rather than giving it to another hive.  I replaced the empty space with a drawn comb.

Last but definitely not least I went to the Morningside Garden hives.  There is one hive that is dead there.  I did an autopsy on it and found absolutely no bees in the hive.  There were dead bees on the screened bottom board - I believe they went queenless into winter and died in the first cold snap.  Clearly they didn't starve.  I took the hive apart and left one box on the hive stand as a swarm lure.

Then I opened the live hive and found the best hive of the day.  This hive was thriving.  Under the cover, I found lots of ants and of all things, ladybugs.  Julia told me she found ladybugs in one of her hives.  This is a first for me in eight years.

But inside the hive were frames and frames of beautiful brood patterns.  I didn't see any swarm cells but I didn't look into the bottom box.  By the time I got here the sun was setting and I had my answer - the hive was doing well.

BTW, I worked on six hives today, lit my smoker and left it at the hive entry, wore no gloves, moved very slowly and did not get stung once even though these bees have not been disturbed all winter.  One of the best parts of wearing no gloves is I could really feel the heat of the hives.  In summer, Atlanta deserves its moniker: Hotlanta and there is no difference between the outside air temp and the temp inside the hive.  But today it was 60 outside but 90 in the hive around the bees and I could really feel it by going gloveless.

I also didn't brush off any bees.  If a bee landed on my hands, as many did, I continued to move slowly and trusted that they weren't after me but rather were landing on my hand because it was there.  I loved the way it all felt.

So I still need to visit the hives at Timber Trail.  I hope the two there are doing better than some of the ones I observed today.  I have time tomorrow, but I think the weather is going to be cold and not good for opening the hives.

Miscellaneous Bee Tid Bits

This morning there were still bees clumped in one of the flowerpots.  This makes me think even more that there is no mated queen.  But I set up the nuc with a Boardman feeder and the bees went into the hive.  I have no idea what to think of this swarm.  I can't check on it until Monday so hopefully they will have gotten their act together by then.



This little clump is pretty connected to the flower pot.


Another miscellaneous topic:  when you buy a package of bees, there are going to be a certain number of bees that die in transit.  This happens simply by the attrition.  In a hive a number of bees die everyday, but in the package, random bees have been shaken in together.  For some of them, their time is up in transit and they die.  In the particular package that I installed in this hive below, there were stacks of bodies on the floor of the package.



Bees don't like to have dead bees in their hive. So the bees quickly moved out the dead bodies. Compare the scene in front of the hive above with the small number of bodies on the ground in front of the other package hive installed the same day pictured below.  The package for the hive below had very few dead bees on the bottom of the package.




And the last miscellaneous bit, the tulip poplar is blooming in Atlanta evidenced by the bloom on the ground below.  This signals the beginning of the nectar flow in Atlanta - much earlier than usual.  Typically in Atlanta the tulip poplar blooms from mid April - mid May.  Now with everything blooming earlier, the question is how will the early spring affect the honey crop this year.

Swarm Trap Success or Honey Bee Democracy?

Tonight when I got home, I noticed bees flying in and out of my swarm trap!  Miracle of miracles.

So now the $64,000 question or at least the $85 (cost of a package) question is how do I know if these are scouts or if a swarm has moved in?

I stood there for 15 minutes and bees continually flew in and out.  I know from reading Thomas Seeley's Honeybee Democracy that they send more and more scouts to determine if a place is the place of choice for the swarm….but with only this one entry way, how will I know?



If they start to build comb, it will be like tearing apart a skep to get the bees!




I tried slightly lifting the hive but it was light as a feather - which makes me think these are scouts, but then a pound of bees might not feel like much up in the air like this.



Here you can see the whole trap.

Anyone have any ideas about how to determine if it's a success and has trapped a swarm?

Making a Homemade Swarm Trap

While wandering around various bee sites the other day, I found this post about how to build a swarm trap from two flower pots. The idea originally came from the Complete Idiot's Guide to Beekeeping by Dean Stiglitz and Laurie Herboldsheimer. I admire Dean and read his posts gladly when he posts on Beemaster.com.

At first I was defeated by the unavailability of these pressed fiber pots in Atlanta - that's right - in Atlanta. The big nurseries use them to pot their trees and rosebushes but are unwilling to sell them. I found everything else at my big box hardware store, but ended up ordering the pots online.

Jeff and I built three swarm traps today. The whole operation takes about 15 minutes, not counting the time it takes for the goop that you use to fill the holes to cure.

First we drilled two holes in the pot that would be the top to put a cable zip tie for hanging. I confess it took me several tries to find the right size drill bit, but once that choice was made, we were up and running. I threaded the cable zip through the holes from the inside, fastened it on the inside, and we had a handle/loop for hanging.

For bait I put two pieces of old comb into each swarm trap. I also smeared the inside with homemade swarm lure (a recipe I posted several years ago) and shook some lemon grass essential oil into it as well.

Then we put the two halves together and Jeff screwed them together with 1 1/4 inch screws.

Then we went out on the deck (Jeff and Valerie live in my old house where the bee hives used to be - if the area where we are looks familiar to you) and used this goopy stuff to fill all the drainage holes but one. The open hole is supposed to provide an entry for the swarm scouts (first) and then the bees.

Since I've caught a swarm on this deck every year since I began beekeeping, we thought we should hang one on the deck. Also if Colony Square does swarm, this might be a place they would go and I wouldn't lose my precious bees!

It was too cold to make another nuc today so we put off another foray into Colony Square for another few days.

I do hope at least one of the three traps draws a swarm.  I'm putting the other two in other places - one at my house and one at the Blue Heron.

Jeff and I decided that hanging this up is a little like fishing - you might not catch a thing, but the process is really fun!  If we do catch a swarm in one of these, we'll unscrew the four connecting screws and dump the bees into a real hive.