SPEAKER:
So, another swarm this one was up a little bit higher I happened to miss this day at work so everybody else took over and did a great job. So, there’s two other brand new employees Colleen is the one that is about ready to catch this swarm and Dana has got the rope over the branch and is pulling it down to make it a little bit more accessible. And this wasn’t the kind of situation where a ladder would have worked and it did work well pulling that branch down. So that’s Wendy in there with just a shirt on the grey shirts she’s a volunteer that’s been working on this for quite a while. She’s done a lot of this and Janet was reaching in there too she’s an experienced beekeeper so no suit. But we try to get our new employees pretty well protected so they can build some confidence before they get too many stings. Well, look at that Colleen’s surrounding that whole swarm there. It’s a nice big swarm and then they’re going to give it a real jerk to shake them off as many as possible in there as big strip in there.
So they got it and got a nice big swarm right into the beehive a little awkward o set that down but she’s getting it into place. And remember this is her first week at work where bees all over the place. That’s Janet’s daughter Robin in the background she’s quite accustomed to having bees around. And her other daughter, Holly’s in the background there Holly just loves catching drones on the entrance to the hive. So now they’re looking for the queen by taking some of those frames out. And I believe they were able to find the queen here let’s just see there she is yep they found found the queen and that is a naked, laying, unclipped queen. What do you think about your your first swarm? It’s very calm exhilarating oh now its going back up its crikey, Crikey. Crikey wait a minute don’t do it without me. Dana?
DANA:
Yeah.
SPEAKER:
How is your first time?
DANA:
Exciting it was exciting a little nerve wracking but it was it was exciting. They’re very gentle so it wasn’t bad.
SPEAKER:
So there you go three swarms, three different situations and a whole bunch of different people involved learning about catching swarms of bees. In the end, we did have some issues with those who swarms they all had mating queens but all three of them ended up being superseded. We’re now into the very end of June we’ve moved past the swimming season but it was intense. This is the most the worst year, in a sense for every beekeeper in terms of swarming lots of swarming. If you’re looking at bee from the bee side of it a good year for reproduction at the colony level. We ended up going through all of our colonies and removing queen cells to try and prevent the swarming. But even that didn’t get at all. But as you can see in the background they’ve moved on and we’ve got lots of supers on the colonies and they are now all queen right. So even the colonies that swarm have have come around now but we’ve actually got some early honey as well. So while they’re preparing to swarm they were packing away the honey so with early swarming, but really honey production too.