Well it has been a crazy Spring here. There has been a lot of shuffling boxes trying to keep the honey that I had on a few of the overwintered colonies safe from getting robbed by other hives. It has been a rebuilding year so trying to split the hives I have currently to make new hives has been a process. I also ordered a few new queens so I have been working on getting them off and running. At this point I am close to the same number of colonies as I had last year. Right about 8 now but heading towards 12.
One way I have been doing this is by adding queen rearing to my skill set. In the past to increase the hives I would simply split a hive and use the bees natural response to build a bunch more queens. This works quite well to build one hive into about three or four hives. There really isn't a downside to this other than that you often have the bees creating queen cells close to one another and I haven't been daring enough to cut them out and spread them around.
So this leads to the idea of grafting. Basically you are taking a young larva of the bees and putting it into a vertical orientation within a cell. The goal is to mimic what the bees do naturally and place a larva you choose into this cell. Once that is done you give these back to a queenless hive of bees and they start to raise new queens from the larva. There are a million other things to thing about when doing all of this, but as I have read and watched other do this it seems like something that I should have in my beekeeping toolbox. So this year I finally gave it a try.
Right now I am waiting to see if I was successful with any of the 20 grafts that I tried. My hope is that I get at least 5 grafts that work. Then I can build on that success later this Summer.
The last exciting thing was I actually go to catch a swarm of bees! A fellow beekeeper who I helped out last year called and said that the bees she had swarmed and she didn't have equipment to put them in, funny I borrowed that equipment last year for a similar reason. I grabbed some things and drove over to her house as quickly as possible, having lost a swarm before to my lack of urgency. When I go their I realized they were about 12 feet in the air and I had no ladder. Luckily a neighbor had an extension ladder we could borrow. I suited up and headed up the ladder, with zero idea on how I was going to do this.
About a dozen stings later I had a bunch of bees in a box and a few left in the tree. We left them overnight as it was dark by the time we had the majority of them in the box. Though no idea if the queen was among those in the box, or if they would stay in the box that I had for them. I came back the next day and tried to get the remaining bees to take to the new box with some limited success. I then brought them to the bee yard and place them in a hive hoping I had the queen and that they would stay. A week later I stopped by to check on them and everyone was in the box, and I even found the queen was back laying again. Here is a picture of them in the tree.
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