Small swarm caught and they needed a little help

See, it isn’t difficult when you have good, clear advise, well done. Cheers

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Hi Dawm, I was talking about something that was said last week on another thread. You would have been away at the time.

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Yeah don’t you hate it when you rattle off a paragraph and then look up and its all in CAPS.

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You are right . I generally type at about 24 WPM with two fingers. Wife laughs at that and does around 120 WPM. Although I suspect that it slipped a bit from lack of typing .
In fact she types as fast as I can dictate.

Hi Busso, yes, I’ve done that more than once :slight_smile:

Thank You all. I think I will recheck the Nuc box in a week to see what is happening. Thoughts? The frame did go a night w/out a lot of bees in the box. The temp was around 57 degrees that night.

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Yeah those flowhivers are a rotten lot aren’t they…
Yawn.

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Could be a secondary or tertiary swarm too, in which case it would be small with a virgin queen. Either way, the frame of brood was a good idea, and they may well need more. :blush:

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Sounds good. If the swarm bees were enough to cover the frame that night, you may be OK. Otherwise, I would consider adding another frame in a week.

It’s not only flow hivers that let colonies swarm. In this case it was an elderly gentleman that was also having trouble with traditional hives & bought a flow hive thinking that would solve his problems. Consequently it didn’t solve his problems.

A lot of flow naysayers in the first place were concerned about this very thing. People were concerned that folks would buy a flow hive thinking that all they had to do is harvest the honey, and therefore not look after their bees. We know that the flow team doesn’t encourage that.

I mentioned flow hiver because the author of this thread (a flow hiver) is also not going to intervene, thus allowing his bees to swarm, even though he previously stated that he wants to harvest honey this year.

Another flow hiver who bought bees from me & also did a 2 and a half hour bee class with me stated, (while picking his bees up) that he wont have to buy a smoker because he owns a flow hive.

There still seems to be that false perception that with a flow hive, everything becomes easy.

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Hi Jeff, are you saying that this person made this statement after the two and a half hour course with you?

Hi Dan, yes he did. I didn’t do a very good job, did I? There was a time gap after the course before he picked up his bees. I used the course to show him how to & get him to wire up & fit the foundation. Actually him as well as his daughter.

I came to a conclusion a while back that the first thing a new beekeeper should learn is how to wire up & fit foundation, along with the basics.

My last contact was we did a kind of barter. His colony was ready to swarm a second time, I got the first swarm via his neighbor while he was on holidays. Anyway he offered me to take a preemptive swarm control split from his hive because it was bearding the same as it was before he went on holidays. In exchange he got a comprehensive brood inspection lesson.

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last year I caught three swarms from one yard- they had all swarmed from one traditional hive. the home owner had a friend who put the hive there and she was supposed to manage it. Only she didn’t and moved to New Zealand. Now he rang me a month ago and wants me to look after that hive from now on. Assuming I can find a house that isn’t too far away I will (for 70% of the honey!). I also had another friend who moved into a house that had an ancient beehive on a shed roof. She says it swarms every year (I told her to call me so I could have a look but she never did)…Then at the bee society a lady from PIRSA said that migratory beekeepers have to take care to tell other people where there hives are: one professional beekeeper died and no one knew where he had his his hives. She said they are still finding stands of hives three years later all over regional SA and Victoria…

Plenty of abandoned traditional hives everywhere.

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Yes I agree Jack, that was in my reply to @skeggley, “It’s not only flow hivers that let colonies swarm”.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a few abandoned traditional hives myself.

Because of the negative comments of the flow naysayers in the beginning, it’s up to all of the flow hivers to prove them wrong, not confirm what they said.

I wasn’t having a go jeff- just saying. The other day a friend said she knows heaps of ‘rich people’ in her hills area that have flow hives: still un-assembled- from the original flow campaign :wink: There’s no doubt quite few people got swept up without really thinking it through. Much of that had little to do with Flow themsleves- and more the hype it all created on the media, etc. But overall I think it has created lots of new and good beekeepers too.

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And re-created some old ones… :smile:

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Hi Jeff, I was thinking it was more a reflection of the learning ability rather than the teaching ability.

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I wonder what the comb honey beekeepers said about the beekeeping tendencies of those with those new fangled extractor things…it sounds like there may have been issues…

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Thanks Dan, I try to cover a lot in that time, I mainly talk about what the bees do & leave time to answer questions. Funny thing was, I think the first question was “how soon before we’ll be harvesting honey?”. He got one of my better queens (in January) because it didn’t take long before he got to harvest honey from a 4 frame nuc & a new queen. Then during August it issued the most enormous swarm. It mustn’t have issued any caste swarms because it was ready to swarm again 2 months later.

Actually looking at the swarm, it was hard to believe that it came from a hive consisting of just one brood, one honey super. I imagine the roof was chockers with bees, the days leading up to the swarm.

I learned a hard lesson that day. I put 2/3rds of the swarm in one box, & the rest in a second box to be picked up just on dark. With the larger amount in a box, I went home to have lunch when I should have taken the box to my main site. By the time I took it down, the sheer volume of bees cooked in the box. I needed a good kick in the backside for that mistake. Needless to say, the other 1/3rd survived, with the queen.

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So true Jack, some people get into bee keeping with no concept of their responsibility to the hive or how to maintain a healthy and productive hive. Some are flow hive owners and some have traditional hives, I think the problem is laziness and a lack of researching beekeeping and what is involved.
Regards