The spring weather is about three weeks more advanced than usual, and the bees have been flying hard taking advantage of the fruit trees in full bloom now. We had planned to work with the bee hives ten days ago, but were put off by cold rainy weather. Now it has turned warm again. 1 May, noted a small curtain of bees in front of the red hive, sign of a swarm coming up.
Today we put a team together, and worked our way through the task list in the next post, set the hives up for summer weather. We did not put the Crisco file folders on the bottom boards under the screen bottoms; I will do that tomorrow. It was suggested at Guelph that we leave a file folder there permanently--changing it from time to time--in addition to the fresh file folders put down for varroa counts. The Crisco traps the varroa mites, so they can't crawl back up into the hive.
We put one frame of drone comb foundation into the new yellow hive's top brood box. This must be removed in 30 days and replaced with another frame of drone comb. This is the most effective varroa control, but fussy.
We did not add a frame of drone comb to the red hive's top brood box.
The red hive was packed full of bees, very young, and they clustered and fell in front of the hive, behind the hive, onto the cart, from which they migrated en masse onto the barn wall, etc. If we had been professional beekeepers we might have found the queen; as it was, we worked as quickly and steadily as we could, and did what we had to. We just have to hope that we didn't destroy her.
I expect that if she's outside the hive, when I go down in the morning, she will have a cluster around her, and the whole cluster can be returned to the hive. If the hive was as close to swarming as it seemed to be, she may have slimmed down to be able to fly, so she can get back into the hive.
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