My first and hopefully only swarm for this year - it's only been a month (3/19/09) since Mr. Ellis and I put empty brood boxes on all the hives. This is what I saw about lunchtime today. Thank goodness I saw the swarm and I could get some help putting these girls in a box. It was a large swarm - lots of bees but very calm and settled.
I called Steve (my neighbor beekeeper) and he came over to help me out. I cut the limb while Steve was holding each end - then he took it over to the nuc box (this is all I had available and I only had shallow supers) and put the limb on top of the box and gave it a little shake and that was that!
This is near the end of the process. Everybody was in the house or trying to get in. It didn't take long for them to get inside with the queen.
My guess was Hive #6 and I was right. After we got the swarm settled, we opened all the hives to see what was happening. In only a month, all the hives had filled their brood boxes with the exception of Nuc #1. It looks fine just not as full as the others - no super will be added.
Nuc #2 was full. Hive #4 was full and we saw the queen. Hive #6 had lots of queen cells - the only hive with queen cells so I know this is where the swarm originated. But you would never know any bees had left - there were lots of bees, brood, honey and queen cells all over the place.
