Dale Hodges
05-12-2008, 08:21 PM
This is a cool story! Got a call that a "beehive" fell out of a tree,would I come a get it? I was wondering what I'd find, but wasn"t even tring to guess. Been a a lot these calls and its never what you think. When I got there, a swarm had decided to build comb in the tree, the high winds had dropped the whole thing in the middle of the road. One man said it had been there 2 or 3 years.
From the look of the dark comb I'd have to agree. Well, the 20"+ fall pretty much made the comb unuseable, I got about 3 to 4 pounds of bees real quick, (it was about 9:30pm).cleaned up the mess and went home. Heres where it gets cool.....I'd set the hive out back by some splits planning on giving them some comb frames and eggs in the morning. When I went out about 9:00, the bees where gone...box empty! Couldn"t find them anywhere.
While I was feeding splits I opened up one new, four frame split and it was packed with bees.... all frames full....standing room only. No fighting everyone was getting along real good. 45 years working bees this spring and I've never seen bees leave one box in mass and join another hive.
From the look of the dark comb I'd have to agree. Well, the 20"+ fall pretty much made the comb unuseable, I got about 3 to 4 pounds of bees real quick, (it was about 9:30pm).cleaned up the mess and went home. Heres where it gets cool.....I'd set the hive out back by some splits planning on giving them some comb frames and eggs in the morning. When I went out about 9:00, the bees where gone...box empty! Couldn"t find them anywhere.
While I was feeding splits I opened up one new, four frame split and it was packed with bees.... all frames full....standing room only. No fighting everyone was getting along real good. 45 years working bees this spring and I've never seen bees leave one box in mass and join another hive.