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05/15/2006 Archived Entry: "If it flees chase it down"

Well this past Saturday I went to remove the hive of bees living in the duckbox. The move went ok, not great but not bad.

Things I have learned. Bees which are nice one weekend may be in a bad mood the next weekend.
The bees were really cool when I did the survey. The following weekend when I went to go and take them down they where outright mean. I got up the ladder to check on them and do a little smoke and halfway up the ladder they nailed me. I went up unprepared without bee gear on and got nailed over 20 times. I have developed a nice immunity to it but the swelling and stiffness still sucks.

Honeycomb can be very delicate. Either in taking down the box or moving it or mounting it. Most of the comb broke. That just sucks. I thought the honey was leaking because of the heat issue. I inspected it through a side door and found most of it had fallen loose.

You can create great enviroments and bees will still abscond. The is the third hive I have taken from the wild. Two of the three have flown off. My record is not very good.

I need to learn ways to spot wild queens easier. I really suck at finding the queens. Even in my hives.

So back to the story. The bees in the duckbox stung the hell out of me. I deserved it. I managed to move the bees to my yard and as I was preparing the new hive for the bees. The duckbox fell over. This may have contributed to the damage on the comb. I rigged up another great migration contrabtion to make up for the flaws that happen with the first one. I had not realized the comb had fallen. The bees just hung on the box. Some hung in the new hive which had a stiff pipe to join the two boxes together.
This means was genius I will post pics and diagrams a little later.

However the element of luck was not with me. I noticed honey dripping out of the bottom on Sunday. Not a lot but some. I figure it was due to heat. I drilled a bunch of small holes into the duckbox to increase ventilation. The duckbox has a side door but I didn't want to open it because the the small hive beetles would move in and the robbing would be bad.

However this morning I decided that I would open it. When I did I saw most of the comb had fallen. It was very sad. Also the bees were still uncertain of the queens location based on their behavior. I went to work. I snuck home briefly after lunch and saw that all the bees had taken off. Well I guess they found the queen and she didn't like where she was at.

I will go through and clean out the duckbox. Try to learn some lessons from this.