That’s the top of all your videos Bobby. Very entertaining on many levels. *****
@Bobby_Thanepohn went sophisticated with the music. My mental musical subtext was from the Brit humor show, Benny Hill…
However, this wasn’t a farce, and Benny Hill was always farcical. Well done, Bobby.
This is truth: As I was working, the camera picked me up doing Yakety Sax under my breath. I’ll try to isolate that segment and share.
I loved the “steam train” effect as you cantered behind the fence. I can also still visualize the horse that you must have descended from before you started running.
The full story behind this is that this colony was an overwintered survivor hive. The queen and bees made it through with only a small, grapefruit-sized cluster. I didn’t do anything to artificially boost their population as I did with other hives so it took quite a long time for the population to build as the queen would not lay beyond her worker’s capability to cover the brood. In late February there were literally only a couple dozen capped brood cells.
Fast forward 3 months and they’d finally gotten the population up enough to decide swarming might be a good idea and started drawing out and filling queen cells. I split off a frame of bees with some healthy cells and a frame of food into a nuc. A week later (this past Sunday) I cut out several (6) capped cells and took them to my buddy Ryan’s to put into his queen castle (3 mating chambers). I also discovered that same day that I’d inadvertently moved my queen into the split the week before.
Yesterday, the remaining QC’s in this tough little hive began to hatch and apparently one of the virgin queens walked out the landing board taking a good deal of her sisters with her. I assume they’d have swarmed had it not been consistently rainy yesterday.
I don’t know if I actually scooped her back up or not but time will tell.