Okay I got this swarm. My bee mentor helped me. I think it's from one of his hives but he is full and couldn't take any more.
So I brought it home in his swarm catching box. A very cool suitcase-like thingy made from either a medium or a cut-down deep with screen wire on the sides and a handle. The swarm is about the size of a big football and a half or maybe almost two footballs.
On the way home my car smelled wonderful. He had given me a frame of drawn comb just out of the freezer and I figured it was that. So I got home and I set the swarm box on my washer and was about to spray them with syrup so they'd have something to eat and I smelled it. The sweetest, warmest scent. I thought, it's the little piece of a limb that's in there with them. But this morning they had moved away from the limb into a big cluster in teh corner of the box and it wasn't the limb or the box. It was the cluster.
It was THE BEES! They smelled SO GOOD!
Nobody ever told me that bees smell good. My packages didn't smell good. By this morning my whole utility/bathroom was filled with that wonderful scent. Of course the packages weren't all from one hive either, and didn't have their own indiginous queen. Could that make a difference?
Does anybody else have bees that smell good? I think I need to market a body lotion named "honeybee cluster". Darn they smelled so good, I hated to dump them in the hive. They're probably not normally gonna let me stick my nose two inches from the cluster without a ruckus.
So I brought it home in his swarm catching box. A very cool suitcase-like thingy made from either a medium or a cut-down deep with screen wire on the sides and a handle. The swarm is about the size of a big football and a half or maybe almost two footballs.
On the way home my car smelled wonderful. He had given me a frame of drawn comb just out of the freezer and I figured it was that. So I got home and I set the swarm box on my washer and was about to spray them with syrup so they'd have something to eat and I smelled it. The sweetest, warmest scent. I thought, it's the little piece of a limb that's in there with them. But this morning they had moved away from the limb into a big cluster in teh corner of the box and it wasn't the limb or the box. It was the cluster.
It was THE BEES! They smelled SO GOOD!
Nobody ever told me that bees smell good. My packages didn't smell good. By this morning my whole utility/bathroom was filled with that wonderful scent. Of course the packages weren't all from one hive either, and didn't have their own indiginous queen. Could that make a difference?
Does anybody else have bees that smell good? I think I need to market a body lotion named "honeybee cluster". Darn they smelled so good, I hated to dump them in the hive. They're probably not normally gonna let me stick my nose two inches from the cluster without a ruckus.