Plain Talk: The Lost Swarm (234)

Episode 234 – Plain Talk: The Lost Swarm 

Jim Tew: Listeners, I just took a spanking. Nature has a way of administering those punitive events when you need one. I don't know if I screwed up or not. It's one of those situations where you did the best you could, and the best you could do just was not good enough. Here's the bottom line. I lost a giveaway, totally free, beautiful swarm that was just a piece of cake, and it got away from me. What's it like, listeners, if you've lost a swarm? What's the comparison? Is it like getting socks for Christmas? I don't know of a good analogy, so I was going to talk my way through it. I'll tell you everything pretty much, the good and the bad and the unknown. Here we go. I'm going to tell you about it.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Listeners, do you remember in early segments coming out of winter that I told you I was amazed to have as many colonies survive as I did because they had been minimally managed? Due to my wife's health issues, I had to take a break. I was just excited beyond all belief that I had as many colonies survive as I did. I only had about a 30% winter loss. One of those colonies was just unreasonably strong. The other two were just okay. They had really been beaten up by the weather, but they're still over here and they've recovered.

Listeners, in order to review, do you remember that not in that segment and subsequent segments, because I talked about it forever, I told you that if I didn't do something later in the spring, that colony was going to swarm? It came out of winter too strong. It was too active. You just get a feeling, don't you? You experienced people who've been there, done that, know all about it. Do you remember I told you that for a list of reasons, some of them legitimate, some of them just laziness, that I was not going to really torment the hive, break it apart and find the queen, and then make the splits and divides so that I could suppress the swarming response?

You see, by doing that, I have all these starter colonies. If I'd done it right, I probably would have had four starter colonies. By doing it not as right and with a degree of sloppiness, I just made half colony splits. It was in four deeps. That's just first-grade arithmetic. I went in and I took two of the deeps and had all stages of brood. I put one on one bottom board and one on the one right next to it. Then I put the other two deeps on top and I said, "That should control your swarming impetus." In my defense, at that time, I said, "I'll probably just get two swarms now. Each of these split halves will swarm, if possibly."

I said that because 100 years ago, when I was still keeping bees in Alabama, there was a boomer beehive in a remote yard, and my brother was with me. I was trying to leave the air that I knew everything about beekeeping. I said, "We will just split this colony in half, put some extra equipment on, and we'll break up that swarming behavior." We did that. No disrespect to anybody from a warm climate listening in, but it's miserable work. It's hot as blazes. You pick up sugars, and there's fire ants, and you're all bundled up because you got all these bees going and flying around.

Can I say I enjoy that? No, I can't say I enjoy that, but I can say that it's fulfilling. At night, I feel like I've done my beekeeperly role. We left the yard and we couldn't come back for about three or four days. For that and other reasons, we came back, and I promise you, no exaggeration, there were two swarms hanging on the fence right behind those colonies. Each half swarmed, even though one of them didn't have a queen unless they had a virgin already. There was that. I couldn't explain to my brother why I got two swarms when one of the colonies didn't even have a queen, but maybe they did have a queen. They did something that was okay with them.

We captured them, and to my recollection, they became colonies. When I was looking at this colony, I was thinking you need to be careful because all you'll do is possibly just enlarge your swarming behavior. I said that to you. Chapter Two. Off I did go today. I'm dealing with macular degeneration in my left eye. It came out of nowhere. Of course, where I am in life right now, I've had to add those eye injections where they give you the shot in the eye for macular degeneration. I went to a different doctor today to protest that and ask if that was really the right thing to do. He said it was spot on. It was the perfect thing to do. Off I do go tomorrow to get one of those eye injections.

I'm not the only one doing it. I know some of you who I'm talking to right now do it all the time. It's not really painful, knock on wood. It's just annoying. Why am I telling you that? Because they check your eyes and they put all that stuff in your eyes, to dilate your pupils and whatever. In this rambling story, I came home and I was wearing sunglasses and my focus field was all wrong. I couldn't really see well and focus on things. I took a short nap. I sat around for a while, and I thought, this would be a good day to do a podcast. It's a beautiful day right now, and it's going to thunderstorm tonight and be raining tomorrow.

I got the urge to talk. Why don't you go back and do a podcast on something really earthshakingly and beekeepingly relevant? With the degree of haziness and fogginess in my vision, off I did go and I walked by a hibiscus bush, which I've been surprised to see is on some a non-native or even an invasive plant list. I didn't know that, but I've got these hibiscus plants and they make nice flowers. Every year, the Japanese beetles and the bees go crazy for those flowers. There it was, listeners, right on the ground, just literally 2 feet off the ground, hanging on a low hibiscus branch was a nice, well-formed swarm.

I did my thing. I went over to it and I just did a quick look on the outside of the swarm, just to be sure that the-- The queen usually runs around on the outside of the swarm, and she's flighty and skittish. If you can see her, you can cage her up, you can go a long way toward nailing that swarm down. Now I want to tell you that I've had swarms leave a caged queen, not often, but often enough that I can tell you that just having the queen in the cage does not conclusively make that swarm not go. Maybe back to the parent colony, maybe it went off on its own and then died a horrifically queenless death.

I don't know what happened to it, but I've had swarms leave with the queen caged. I went back to the back to pick up some equipment. It's all sitting around back here. Then I made the trip back. Why don't we take a break? Because you know what's coming. You know what's coming. Let's take a break. Let me get up this time. I'm going to tell you about it.

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Jim: As I walked by that swarm, and I noticed it was nicely formed and everything looked good, of course, I snatched out my camera and with poor vision, wearing sunglasses that are polarized, so I have a terrible time seeing my phone screen, I finally got a picture made. I noticed that they were really flighty, and I admonished myself, "You need to be alert." I don't have on any protective gear. They're not going to be particularly aggressive, but they're so flighty that if you get one down your shirt or behind your glasses, it's going to be ugly. With the proper degree of intrepidation, I got a five-frame nuke out of the bee yard, walked it back down.

Listeners, by the time I got back, it was crystal clear that that swarm is breaking up. Just to give you a time frame, it was about 5:00 in the afternoon, because when I walked away, I confidently said, "This late in the day, they'll stay there till tomorrow. This is going to be a remarkably easy swarm." Then I had a thought that I didn't know what to do with, and the thought was I really don't want any more bees right now. I've got enough colonies to keep me happy and to keep me managing, and if I keep adding colonies, I guess-- I've never raised rabbits, but I guess like raising rabbits, at some point you got a lot more rabbits or a lot more goats than you ever really wanted.

I've got neighbors who are apprehensive about bees. I didn't want to put an unreasonable number of bees back here. I put the nuke under straight away. I knew that they were breaking up, and I shook them in just as the swarm was breaking up. I shook them in. That swarm beautifully fell on top of those five frames. Those bees had no interest, N-O, no interest, none, underlined and bolded in going into that five-frame nuke. They were just running like crazy. Even in the heat of battle, there's a part of you that can have other thoughts. I thought, how did the bees know? How did the bees get the word? Every one of those bees knew that swarm was breaking up.

That's the moment when beekeepers run, get water hoses, and they tang with metal to try to bring the swarm down. It doesn't work, but it gives you something to do while your swarm is leaving. I knew what was going to happen. They've moved into the air. I've said poetic things in the past. It's like watching the minute hand on your watch. These bees were really in a hurry. They got airborne in a hurry, and they raised up beside the locust tree, probably 40 to 45 feet into a large conglobulate ball of flying bees, and the hum was in the air, even in my bad hearing, with my hearing aids going, I could clearly hear the hum. I could see the bees.

I had thought number seven or eight, "I guess they're going to cluster up on that limb where I can't get to them." No, it was worse than that. Those bees are gone. If I tried to make comments about swarm biology, I can't tell which way they were going. I can just tell that they were going. I've had this happen before. I knew it was coming, and it did. You watch them and you watch them and you watch them while they're just aimlessly flying all about. Someone sounds the alarm, and that mass of flying bees and following the scouts that are flying above the swarm based on some work that Tom Seeley did, they take off in the direction of the new nest site, following the directions of those scouts flying above the swarm.

I guess I'm dragging it out. I'm dragging it out because I don't want to say it. Poof. They were gone. Just like all my previous experiences, and just like I expected, they were gone within 20 seconds. The bees are gone, the sound is gone, the swarm is probably moving about 22 to 25 miles per hour. I have no earthly idea where it went. I don't even know which direction it went in. I did two things. I'll give you both of them, and then I'll follow up on them. The first thing I did was go back to that nucleus colony, because to my way of thinking, there was an odd number of bees left, 2 to 300 bees were just fiddling around on the grass.

With my real foggy, dark, light challenged vision, I looked everywhere for a ping pong ball-sized cluster of bees that, possibly on a beautifully lucky afternoon, would be surrounding the queen, who maybe didn't go for whatever reason. No, no golf ball-sized mini cluster of bees surrounding a queen. She made the trip. She's gone. I thought, secondly, maybe, maybe they just returned to the parent nest. Off I did go back to my bee yard, and it was fairly obvious that the one that I said would swarm was the culprit. There were a few bees massed on the front in odd positions. The front of the colony and the entrance didn't have the typical busy-bee flight activity.

It looked like it had been in a barroom brawl. There were some bees hanging here, a few 100 bees clustered in masses on the front. The flight in front of the colony was minimal. The only way I could confirm it for sure is to open the colony up and look for swarm cells. That would just tell me that that colony was considering swarming, too. That means if I open the one next to it, it probably has queen cells because that would mean that was the half that didn't get the queen when I made the split. They're gone. Pause. Pause here. Pause and think. How do I deal with that? My first thought was it offsets the one swarm I did get, because now I've lost a swarm.

Number two, puts beekeeping egg on my face because I told you that that was a swarm I didn't get. I'll give it to engineer Jeff, and he can post that on the webpage if you want to see the one that got away. It's just a swarm hanging close to the ground. Then there's this. I think the rain had something to do with it, this coming. There's thunderstorms due tonight and actually some pretty good storms, apparently tornado watches, and I'm just conjecturing that those bees seem to be particularly in a hurry because they knew they had a burden on them.

Last night I went over to a friend's house to cook a couple of steaks outside and sit outside on a nice night. It was some clouds here and there, but the guy's dog was just a nutcase. Just a nutcase. Couldn't settle down, antsy, upset, too close, wouldn't go away, wouldn't calm down. He said, "Let me check the weather." He checked and he said, "Yes, we've got thunderstorms that are going to be here inside of 30 minutes," and they were, and that dog who's afraid of thunder was either hearing it or was aware of it. I just speculate that in some mystical way that wildlife whose life depends on not getting drowned in a thunderstorm must know that something is on the horizon.

It's just me conjecturing. When all is said and done, listeners, I've just bounced the rubble here for the last 20 minutes or so. I lost a swarm. I try to tell myself that it's no big deal, I got enough bees and everything's okay, but I can't get away from this. I lost a swarm. It's gone. Now I got to bring that empty box back in here with a few forlorn bees in it. See if they'll find their way back home and get on with things. It happens, doesn't it? Thank you so much for sweating through this thing, if you're still listening. It's a sad saga. It's a pity party here in my apiary. I'm Jim. Until next week, telling you bye.

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