AltamontBee
07-05-2009, 08:14 PM
I have what seems to be a really strange situation....
We had 4 hives-two strong, one weak, and one new, but doing really well.
We assisted a neighbor who is also a beekeeper in catching a really large swarm at his place, but said he was too busy to take on another hive, and let us bring it home.
We got them set up in a deep with a medium on top-drawn out empty frames. Because it was such a large swarm we then added another medium with 6 frames of syrup/honey from a hive we lost last year, and 4 empty frames.
We left for part of the day, and came home to literally hundreds of dead bees in between the swarm hive and our strongest hive. We watched for a bit and saw the bees from our strongest hive dragging out and dumping bees- it looks like the new swarm was trying to rob out our strongest hive!! It just kept going on-massive activity at our strong hive, with three or 4 bees dragging out intruders almost constantly. We saw nothing near any of the other hives.
We put entrance reducers on the swarm and the hive being robbed, and it was near dark by this time.
Any other ideas or suggestions? We've never had a robbing situation here before, and it just seems odd that this swarm would be going after the strongest hive in our yard!!
Thanks for any input or suggestions!
Jennifer
We had 4 hives-two strong, one weak, and one new, but doing really well.
We assisted a neighbor who is also a beekeeper in catching a really large swarm at his place, but said he was too busy to take on another hive, and let us bring it home.
We got them set up in a deep with a medium on top-drawn out empty frames. Because it was such a large swarm we then added another medium with 6 frames of syrup/honey from a hive we lost last year, and 4 empty frames.
We left for part of the day, and came home to literally hundreds of dead bees in between the swarm hive and our strongest hive. We watched for a bit and saw the bees from our strongest hive dragging out and dumping bees- it looks like the new swarm was trying to rob out our strongest hive!! It just kept going on-massive activity at our strong hive, with three or 4 bees dragging out intruders almost constantly. We saw nothing near any of the other hives.
We put entrance reducers on the swarm and the hive being robbed, and it was near dark by this time.
Any other ideas or suggestions? We've never had a robbing situation here before, and it just seems odd that this swarm would be going after the strongest hive in our yard!!
Thanks for any input or suggestions!
Jennifer