December Swarm

It was the afternoon of December 17th when I happened to glance outside and to my surprise I saw a swarm taking place in the backyard.  I couldn’t believe I was witnessing a swarm in mid-December, but here in Florida it has been rather warm this winter, so I guess it is possible.  I had to take a video of it happening.

The swarm decided to settle on one of our hives which caused me to worry about what was going on. Was this a swarm from my own hive? Was this a feral swarm trying to invade my hive? Lots of questions swirled in my head.  I approached the hive after things started to calm down and saw some bees fighting, not a good sign.

Swarm beginning to settle.

Swarm finally calmed down.

A few days later my husband and I opened up the hive to do an inspection.  The behavior of the hive had completely changed. They were no longer our quiet calm bees, but instead they were very antsy.  Not aggressive or trying to attack us, but moving around as if they were restless.  Our efforts to find our marked queen that day were useless, so we closed up the hive and decided to wait another week.

Finally on December 28th we opened the hive again to find the same restless behavior.  We also found eggs, but in a random laying pattern and then…there was a new unmarked queen!  Bad news for us.  This means that our hygienic queen was probably forced out of the hive or killed by this feral swarm and they moved into the hive.  So we took immediate action.  We killed the feral queen and combined the hive with another one of our stronger hives to save any of the remaining worker bees.  Combining hives has been a very successful tactic for us in this type of situation.  Once spring arrives we will be able to split this hive and give them a new hygienic queen.

Combined hives.

If you are wondering why we have paper between the two hives, this is so the bees can smell each other and accept each other.  You put down a sheet of paper on top of the strong hive that has a queen, you cut small slits into the paper and then place the weak queenless hive on top.  The slits allow the bees to smell each other and then they begin chewing through the paper and become a single hive.  They eat through the paper pretty quick, usually within a day they are combined.

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Hive Combination & a New Queen

Just wanted to give a quick update of our weekend inspection.  A few weeks ago I posted about a queenless hive and a round queen cell.  Well, we have a new queen!  We didn’t see her, but we did find new eggs and very young brood, positive signs that there is a queen. 🙂 We’ll try to find her and mark her during our next inspection.

Then we had a hive that was not doing so great these past weeks.  It happens.  The population was dwindling and the queen was not laying,  so we had to make a decision.  We killed the old queen and combined the weak hive with one of our strong hives.  We decided not to requeen because the population was small and could not support a new queen at this time.  Soon we’ll split the strong hive, thus creating a new hive and give the bees a chance to produce a new queen.