How would you handle this situation? Bees on a cairn? My gut says it could have been done better than what we did. Run down of what happened:
-My dad has kept bees in the past, didn't have any as of yesterday, but did have equipment. Heard a swarm, walked to the nextdoor neighbor's house and watch them gather on a cairn.
-Brought over a bait hive with lgo, but they didn't show much interest.
-I tried to get them to walk onto frames (with wax foundation, but not drawn, working with what we have here). They didn't.
The day was moving along, so we got a hive body ready for them, and maybe at about 5:30 decided to go ahead and spritz the bees down with sugar water and take the cairn apart, to physically put them into a box that we could then dump them into the hive body from. But . . . it's a cairn. It's precariously balanced, and built of heavy rocks. In the process, my dad dropped/fell with one of the larger rocks into the box, the bees got angry, we walked away, gave them a bit of space, got bees out of my hair, got a smoker, came back. After that, everything worked out OK, we were able to brush off the rest of the rocks, one by one, and not drop them, and dump swarm into the hive body. Still . . . I feel like there must have been a better way. Should we have left them to come into the bait hive or just spend the night on the cairn? (It got down to 39 degrees F here last night) And, what now? Feed them? I'm worried we may have squished the queen. (They've pulled a quite a few bee corpses onto their new front porch. :'( ) And pissed them off. How long should I just leave them alone? I don't want to scare them off. I'm thinking I should add 4 more frames to the deep sooner than later -- but should I just let them get some brood in before bothering them at all. What kind of time line protocol do y'all follow for swarm catching follow up?
-My dad has kept bees in the past, didn't have any as of yesterday, but did have equipment. Heard a swarm, walked to the nextdoor neighbor's house and watch them gather on a cairn.
-Brought over a bait hive with lgo, but they didn't show much interest.
-I tried to get them to walk onto frames (with wax foundation, but not drawn, working with what we have here). They didn't.
The day was moving along, so we got a hive body ready for them, and maybe at about 5:30 decided to go ahead and spritz the bees down with sugar water and take the cairn apart, to physically put them into a box that we could then dump them into the hive body from. But . . . it's a cairn. It's precariously balanced, and built of heavy rocks. In the process, my dad dropped/fell with one of the larger rocks into the box, the bees got angry, we walked away, gave them a bit of space, got bees out of my hair, got a smoker, came back. After that, everything worked out OK, we were able to brush off the rest of the rocks, one by one, and not drop them, and dump swarm into the hive body. Still . . . I feel like there must have been a better way. Should we have left them to come into the bait hive or just spend the night on the cairn? (It got down to 39 degrees F here last night) And, what now? Feed them? I'm worried we may have squished the queen. (They've pulled a quite a few bee corpses onto their new front porch. :'( ) And pissed them off. How long should I just leave them alone? I don't want to scare them off. I'm thinking I should add 4 more frames to the deep sooner than later -- but should I just let them get some brood in before bothering them at all. What kind of time line protocol do y'all follow for swarm catching follow up?