I've NEVER Seen This Before... EVER!!

so while we were up here catching the swarm all of a sudden i could just feel in the air that there's a sudden change this is what i'm talking about about this magical feeling that you're up in your ape area and you see that your bees are getting ready to start to swarm now i haven't seen where they're landing and i'm watching them can come closer and kind of see what i'm talking about i don't know if my camera is going to pick this up but do you see this swirl of bees now this is probably going to be a fairly small swarm if i can get it to settle down and then find out where they are landing this is the fun part because they're all starting to kind of rush out of the hive now if you look let's see if i can kind of get an idea on where they're gathering and it's very possible they actually might go gather back over where we just caught that swarm from but what i have oh nope okay i see i'm going over here there's an old tale when it comes to catching swarms about mimicking thunder and you want to get two metal items together and you want to clank it together okay and pretend like thunder is coming and what that's gonna do is that's gonna make them kind of be like okay we gotta hunker down a storm is coming so they're gonna settle so i'm going to yeah look yep girls all right i'm going to try to i don't know if i i don't know if this is loud enough [Music] we are in the middle of the swarm where are you going this does aggravate them a little bit but it helps at least it's helped with me at least once or twice in my past oh my goodness look at them naughty bees on another note though isn't this magical um all right i'm gonna let them kind of settle right there for a second i don't know where they're going if i can if i can kind of catch a glimpse of where they might be settling it it seems like they started to all kind of rush out and then as soon as i started clanking they've been kind of settling right there at the entrance um kind of underneath of the colony so we're gonna wait just a couple of seconds and if we see anything i'm gonna grab the camera and take you guys with me uh so after we've gone ahead and inspected all of the other colonies i did go back and check and see what's going on these bees never left and i i've actually never seen this happen but i have read about it where bees will tend to do what they call as like a practice swarm so it's like it's like the pre-swarm before the swarm i i want to laugh because it's like there let's see how fast we can leave our hive in a short period of time just to freak the beekeeper out and so that's what they did it's kind of like a fire drill yeah it's it's kind of like a fire drill they all decided to leave fly off into the air for a little while then they ended up landing right back at the entrance because i did go ahead and start doing a hive inspection and i'll show you what i found which indicates they're trying to swarm so when i came in here to do a hive inspection i uh started noticing right there down at the bottom do you see that look at that little beautiful peanut that right there is a swarm cell and so if i see it kind of like scattered around the front randomly i don't do anything about it that's basically either superseding or making emergency queen and that really just depends on what is happening inside the colony but if i see day old egg and if i see something like that i'm going to go ahead and pull it and make a split and put it in a nuke box because if they're planning on swarming anyways i might as well just go ahead and and see if i can go ahead and make a split with it and then double my odds but the biggest thing that you want to make sure and do is to double check to make sure that that queen is not necessarily on that frame but if she was and they were already making a new you know making a new queen accidents happen but bees are pretty resilient and they're gonna do a good bit to to continue to survive and there's another one yeah look at all those peanuts and it looks like one has newly emerged but there's still an abundance of swarm cells need all those so we went through and did a hive inspection and i found three frames that looked extremely promising with swarm cells down on the bottom we went ahead and made three splits from our horizontal colony and i think that one's going to be just fine it looks great but these if we didn't do this they were 100 gonna swarm um and in fact i kind of think the last one that we caught in the dogwood tree i think they actually came from that colony so i'm thinking that that pretend swarm i think that's exactly what it was and i'm glad that we were able to go in and do a quick inspection and pull some of those some of those frames oh okay make sure things are clipped really good i think i'm gonna have to thank you guys for watching and as always don't be afraid to get your hands dirty and learn something old bye guys oh

Channel: The Honeystead

Views: 55,226

Keywords: Pretend swarm, Honeybee, Beekeeping, Pre-swarm, Making splits with queen cells, Making splits with swarm cells, Swarm cell, Keeping bees, Horizontal hive

Id: pHxDbEFaZ0c

Length: 8min 17sec (497 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022