Was a busy couple days. First I caught a swarm in my neighbours back yard. The next day I watched my hive swarm and grabbed her majesty and her followers.
Have to love reproduction. I have learned a lot in the last little while, and looking forward to the next adventures the lil’ ladies bring me!
<img src="//cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/flex016/uploads/honeyflow/original/2X/9/97ce69834d43a2bb69b10977900f957b8820dd1e.jpg" width=“281” height="500
Where are you in Melbourne , how come you have sunshine!??
Yup, I’m in Melbourne and it’s been the busiest swarm season in a long while according to my mentor.
I’ve got 2 myself. I’m in the Dandenongs & weather is foul, are you on the other side of Melb. perhaps?
I’m in Bundoora…
It’s Swarm City here in Adelaide just now as well. 12 days ago I had no beehive with bees but many empty hives waiting and ready to go…
Today I own 2 overwintered 5 frame Nucs, 1 split (making new queens) and three Swarms! 6 Colonies in Total! in one day I got 4 of them… and had to turn down a swarm.
One of the swarms came from a beek who caught 20 swarms in 10 days! He offered me two but I didn’t have two nucs ready.
The other two swarms came from a beeks own hives- one is enormous: it was so big it wouldn’t fit into an 8 frame box. It started preparing to re-swarm- but we managed to tempt it to stay by putting a flow super straight onto it. The swarm easily filled both boxes with bees! After just a few days they had built a lot of comb and were bringing in lots of pollen and storing nectar. I will be very interested to see how they deal with the flow frames.
The next swarm is a smallish one- it fit nicely into a five frame nuc.
I am building and wax dipping more hives to prepare for more bees to come- I hope to have 10-15+ colonies by seasons end- and may even make some autumn splits to have even more next year. I now need an apiary management app! Yay!
Just today the weather turned for the better- the bees were out in force and veritable streams of pollen were going back into every hive. It looks as if this will be a record season in Adelaide after all this spring rain.
Good to hear[quote=“Semaphore, post:6, topic:8832”]
Just today the weather turned for the better-
[/quote]
hopefully we get it too, we seem to get SA’s weather rolling on through…
