Today morning, I looked up above my fence to see if the blue box where I kept a honey frame and the shaken bees from the swarm is empty or if there are bees flying around where it already made it’s home. To my pleasure, the swarm box had high level of activity and the rest of the bees still clustered together yesterday, up in the tree 20 feet high, is now gone, I am hoping they all came and found their home in the bee box.
There were tremendous activity in the hive, and I waited till the sun goes down to cover up the bee box and bring it home. When the sun was down, there wasn’t any activity in the box at all. I am hoping all the foraging honey bees have come back to roost there, I sincerely hope that they did not abscond the hive, going after the scout bees. Anyway, I brought them home, in fact I brought the hive through my home through the front door to the back door to the backyard. That was a very bold move, I thought, but they were all very quiet. Anyway, I put them next to the other hives and open the gate. A few bees came out. I am hoping I would find more bees tomorrow. I am not sure if I need to move them all to a regular hive tomorrow or leave them there for a few days. before I start to feed them sugar water through the boardman feeder.
In the mean time, my son Nikhil and I assembled 20 hive bodies, they are nuc bodies and have kept in our garage to paint them tomorrow. I might move the caught swarm to a nuc soon.
I have also asked Caleb Oakley to make me nuc boxes out of old boxes. He agreed to do that for $15 a piece. I paid $30 or so for the new full nuc hive. So I would have 20 nuc boxes and 4 super boxes on the nuc. I am going to try to build a bee hive this year with just nuc boxes. Also I am going to split all my hives to make around 50 bee hives – all in the farm. I am hoping that I can manage them well. There is water in the farm, a big 2 acre pond, so that is no problem. But I am afraid if there is much flowers in the farm country, hope there are folks who grow cotton and other nectar forming flower-bearing crops. I am also afraid that everyone might use high levels of pesticides which might lead to colony collapse problem on my hive in the future. I need to publicize and work for pesticide free farming, I am not bringing any of that cancer producing, bee colony collapsing chemicals to my farm, for sure! I am planning on a permaculture based (zero budget farming) technique.
My farm website is http://www.indusfarm.com
