Hello, bee friends. This is a very standard noob question, but I'll ask for your patience as I've read many, many pages on this and still find myself confused.
I have a colony of Carniolans that successfully overwintered for the first time and is doing just gangbusters (and a second that failed and had to be restarted, but they're fine now too). I'm also in Connecticut, and we've had bizarre weather this year that has thrown my expectations out the window. Anyway, I suspected they would get ready to swarm since they were so strong; so I opened up some space by putting on supers and swapping in some undrawn frames, monitored for swarm cells and didn't see any, so all seemed to be well. Well... apparently I got a bit lax with my monitoring, because two days ago (May 15) I saw a large swarm in a tree about 50' from my hives. Doing a full inspection today I found there are still TONS of bees but no queen (but may well have missed her), lots of capped worker and drone cells but few larvae and no eggs, lots of honey, nectar, and pollen stores, and many swarm cells in various stages, both capped and uncapped. I had intended to make a split, but am frankly too inexperienced to fully interpret the situation and don't want to do the wrong thing so I've left them alone for the moment.
1. How do you interpret this situation? Do you think that swarm was from my hive? The proximity and lack of queen/eggs suggests to me that yes they already swarmed, but the number of bees, capped cells, larvae, and nectar/honey contradicts that. On a side note, I called another keeper to come take the swarm so they'll go to a good home either way.
2. What's your recommended course of action? If they haven't already swarmed, it seems at this point too late to stop them, no? There are so many options depending on the situation I'm not sure which way to go... I can split them to make a nuc, remove the swarm cells, (assuming they swarmed already) wait to see eggs from the new queen and THEN remove the swarm cells, leave them alone assuming they know better than me, etc.
Thanks for any advice. My goal is to maximize honey production, but the health of the colony is paramount. If it's too late to salvage for this year, I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience for next time.
I have a colony of Carniolans that successfully overwintered for the first time and is doing just gangbusters (and a second that failed and had to be restarted, but they're fine now too). I'm also in Connecticut, and we've had bizarre weather this year that has thrown my expectations out the window. Anyway, I suspected they would get ready to swarm since they were so strong; so I opened up some space by putting on supers and swapping in some undrawn frames, monitored for swarm cells and didn't see any, so all seemed to be well. Well... apparently I got a bit lax with my monitoring, because two days ago (May 15) I saw a large swarm in a tree about 50' from my hives. Doing a full inspection today I found there are still TONS of bees but no queen (but may well have missed her), lots of capped worker and drone cells but few larvae and no eggs, lots of honey, nectar, and pollen stores, and many swarm cells in various stages, both capped and uncapped. I had intended to make a split, but am frankly too inexperienced to fully interpret the situation and don't want to do the wrong thing so I've left them alone for the moment.
1. How do you interpret this situation? Do you think that swarm was from my hive? The proximity and lack of queen/eggs suggests to me that yes they already swarmed, but the number of bees, capped cells, larvae, and nectar/honey contradicts that. On a side note, I called another keeper to come take the swarm so they'll go to a good home either way.
2. What's your recommended course of action? If they haven't already swarmed, it seems at this point too late to stop them, no? There are so many options depending on the situation I'm not sure which way to go... I can split them to make a nuc, remove the swarm cells, (assuming they swarmed already) wait to see eggs from the new queen and THEN remove the swarm cells, leave them alone assuming they know better than me, etc.
Thanks for any advice. My goal is to maximize honey production, but the health of the colony is paramount. If it's too late to salvage for this year, I'll just chalk it up to a learning experience for next time.