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Doh!

After the hive swarmed I forgot to close the upper entrance. That's where the queen went in after mating. So that whole time I didn't see any brood it was because she was laying in the...

that's a good idea.

Doing the math, my queenless hives last had a new worker emerge less than 21 days after the swarm left, or more than a week before I introduced the new queen. Assuming she...

I'm in the same boat. All 3 of my hives swarmed between May 15th and 22nd. I caught one and it's doing very well. I checked them over this weekend and of the 3, only 1 had any brood in it (about 2...

Well I'm sure glad you did. I was just about the ask the same question.

I was cleaning out my 3 hives on Friday and realized that one of them was down to about 200 bees. Found one frame with...

very cool - thanks for sharing these.

Back in the days of film (esp slide) the rule for shooting in snowy conditions was to set the camera for manual, meter the snow (e.g. point the camera at a patch of snow so that it fills the...

My hives always look like that at the end of winter. In fact just this w/e it went up to 10 C so I put feeders on the hives and cleared out the inch or so of dead bees that built up on the bottom...

Yes, so long as you have some way of protecting the frames from bugs and stuff. I routinely don't get around to extracting for a week or 2 after pulling them off the hive.

A local commercial keep...

Just put the frames back, the bees will clean it up.

What do you call the waxy gunk that you skim off the top of the settling tank/bucket? Is there an official, pretty sounding name for this stuff?

I've got a couple of allery suffers at work that...

oh, they'll do much, much better than that if necessary! I caught a swarm but found I was a frame short. Took a week before I could get back at it and found this stuck to the inner cover!!!
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Woops! Coulda sworn I had put 9 frames in there....

http://inlinethumb10.webshots.com/30729/2735366200054863644S600x600Q85.jpg

I wish all swarms were that co-operative :-) Great picture of you and boys in the thick of it.

Ah great! I bought a few of those plastic containers on sale with something like that in mind but stumbled when it came to the actual implemenation - now I know how I can go do it!

Okay, I'm pretty sure this hive is dead - just not sure why. They only brood I can find is drone - couldn't find anything resembling a queen. There's still the equivalent of 6 frames of honey...

...the second swarm got away - my daughter chased it for about 1/2km (across two cow pastures) before encountering a forest and gave up.

They seemed to have found a nice branch -
http://inlinethumb61.webshots.com/37180/2218295880054863644S600x600Q85.jpg
Seem to be at home now - my daughter taking a break from pottery to check them...

Wow - I had two hives swarm within 20 minutes of each other!! While I was busy tracking and photographing the first swarm my daughter yelled to me that another swarm was forming over the beeyard
...

Interesting hives there. Do you have the brood up top and the honey "supers" on the bottom?

Retro shot of two of my hives, looking rather "rustic".

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/photopost/data/4938/medium/travelling-07s.jpg

Was this in some cottage or abandoned house or something?

Hard to image how a colony can get that big in someone's house before they decided to do something about it! I mean, wouldn't the...

*sigh* time to break out the formic acid pads...

http://nnphotoclub.dnsalias.com/albums/macro/verro_mite_big.jpg

Nikon D40, 18-135mm lens, with an old 50mm lens held _backwards_ over the end of...

Ditto - see my pictures posted last August.

How long did the swelling take to go down?

Still snow on the ground but the temperature has been so warm (10-15C) the bees are bursting out. While they still have lots of honey stores left I took the opportunity to let them clean out some...