We heard these words coming from Matthew who was outside. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon. Needless to say, we got outside as quickly as possible. We were in time to hear a loud roaring buzz up on the hill. Our beehive is quite a ways up on the mountain and we don’t usually hear them buzz. Something was definitely up!
Then we saw a cloud of bees move from one tree back up the hill for a ways with a tremendously loud buzzing. It was quite a sight! And then everything was quiet and still. Evidently they landed somewhere close.
We had hoped that by adding the additional hive body and super the colony would not swarm this year. We thought we were in the clear because this is very late for a swarm. Lisa and I went up the mountain to check on the hive, thinking the worst may have happened. The hive looked fine. It wasn’t turned over and it wasn’t deserted. It looked just as it had the last time we were up there, so we figured that we had witnessed a swarm.
We walked around and around looking where we thought we had heard and seen the swarm stop, hoping to find them attached to a low limb. If we could find them, we could transplant them into another hive and have a second honeybee colony! We have another hive just waiting to be assembled so that would have been no problem.
They were no where to be found. Perhaps they actually swarmed yesterday, Wednesday, and had been hanging on a limb all day today. We were not out at this time yesterday so we would have missed it. We have read that they will swarm one day to a tree or someplace and send out scouts looking for a new home. Then they will move at about the same time they swarmed, just 24 hours later. All we could figure is that what we actually witnessed was the swarm moving to a new found home. They are probably in a hollow tree somewhere on our mountain.
They are incredible insects. Here are some pictures of the Genesis Colony taken a few weeks ago. It looks pretty much the same today:
Here is a close-up of one of our bees:
We are planning on adding another super soon and checking to see how much honey is in the current one. When we do that, I’ll try to get some pictures of us in our bee outfits with the smoker. We didn’t get any pictures the first time we got into the hive to add the new hive body and super, but it was a good experience. The smoker worked great and neither one of us received any stings. Hopefully they will be as agreeable the next time, also, even though they lost part of their colony.
As far as we can tell, our colony is still doing fine. It is a shame that we lost our first swarm, but I suppose that there will be more. That is definitely the way we would like to add future colonies instead of having to buy more. We thank the Lord for our honeybees and for allowing us to have this learning experience. To God be the glory!
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