The long hives weren't quite ready for the surprise shake. The screen I used for the floor was kinda saggy rendering the follower board ineffective. I've been dragging my feet about replacing that with a few sheets of the plastic needle point backing hoping that I'd discover someone in the mean time who'd sell me and endless roll of the stuff. As well, there's been some debate about which side of a long hive is most beneficial to put the entrance on: the "sides", or the ends. The floor is still the saggy nylon screen that I installed there when I built them. I'll just have to reinforce the gap at the bottom of the follower board with a small bag of sand - it ought to serve in a pinch, and this is a pinch. After a lot of internal deliberation, it turns out that I don't really care which side the entrance(s) are made on, only because if I don't like where they are, or it becomes advantageous to move them, I'll just bung the old entrance closed: Problems dealt wit'. . .
. . . Mostly. I took for granted that Scotty had his electric drill at Medford, but discovered upon arriving that it was not in working order and I hadn't brought my tools with me from the Valley. I ended up using a crappy old hand cranked drill to make a ½" hole toward the bottom of one of the long sides. It took me a half hour to drill through the ¾" board. I'm thrilled with the large blister I developed on the palm of my hand in the process.
The installation was kind of text book or, at least, went well from there I guess, as I've never used this style of hive before. I ended up securing the queen cage by squeezing it between a couple of the top bars, like I did previously with Langs, which left enough of a gap toward the top that bees could come and go through. So, I covered that section of top bars with a suitable rag carpet to discourage the bees from using this as an entrance. To feed them and stimulate wax production I turned over the can of syrup that came in the package so it would seep slowly between the top bars at the far end, and covered that with a small plastic bucket. This is a temporary measure and precludes putting the proper roof on until they drain the syrup can and I can replace it with a baggie feeder. But a sheet of plywood and a series of rain free days in the forecast makes this less of a concern for me than the little gap in the top bars. . .
Which I discovered, upon checking on them this morning, they have adopted as their primary entrance. I decided that I was better off to break this habit sooner rather than later, after there's fragile comb in place. I understand that bees build their comb in relation to the entrance of the hive, but I don't understand what that relation is, exactly. Nonetheless I decided to remove the queen cage and drive a small nail into its side so to hang it from, thereby reducing the gap in the top bars. Upon removing it I noticed significantly more attendants inside the cage than I remember from last evening but I couldn't tell if any of them were the mother despite the fact she's marked with a very apparent blue dot. I tilted the small box to verify that the marshmallow plug had been removed (which it had, indeed) and that's the moment when the queen made a brief appearance at the opening and flew away, off into the sky. . . as my heart sank.
I stood there a moment letting my disappointment sink in, getting comfortable with a most uncomfortable burning feeling of failure. Although the queens tend not to wander far they will go high and I was starting to imagine myself sitting there all morning watching my hive slowly abscond and reincorporate at the top of a tall tree somewhere out of reach. How could I be so careless? I was scheduled to be at work in less than an hour and I started looking frantically through the single bees that had alighted here and there on nearby branches but none of them bore the telltale mark of this years royalty. Should I beg out of work? Will extra time do any good? I scanned the tree tops, I watched for an exodus at the entrance that I had spent so much time and effort establishing. I checked back again with the lone stragglers, over and over.
After more than the time allotted for worrying to no avail I began packing up the scattered tools and emptying my smoker. In my haste I had left my veil hanging over the rail of the front stoop. Working my way houseward, I gathered that last and, much to my joy and relief the queen had settled on the mesh and was waiting there with a few of her attendants for me to retrieve her and return her to the hive!
After righting all my errors I sat in front of the hive watching the bees clustering here flying wildly about there, slowly figuring out the corrections I had made, feeling proud of my resistance to the "Primal Response", basking in the feeling of relief that comes with "having my lesson without having to eat it too" and contemplating the details of what I'd learned in the process. As if to cement these lessons securely in my memory one of the froggier girls flew up stung me right on the edge of my right eyelid! POW!
Don't you forget it!
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doodlemaier
This morning I discovered this open-comb, free-hanging, feral honey bee nest in my backyard at Medford. Naturally I'm wondering where this colony came from and how long they've been in the tree. It's not likely that either of the Easter colonies had the time/resources to swarm again so early in the season. They could be another random product of 2012 Swarmapalooza season, or my theory is that these are the survivors of a colony, Isis, that I kept at this location last year which I thought had succumbed early after I attempted to transition the summer cluster into a framed hive body, but I never did find the queen among the too few dead bees left behind in the hive. I remember being suspicious at the time that they might have absconded. The colonies that I have situated at this location presently were both acquired this season on Easter day, one as an early swarm from my own hive on Easter morning in Strasburg, and the other inhabited a bait box later that afternoon in nearby Bentonville. Hence the name the Easter Apiary at Medford
There are four large distinct combs, ranging in size from a Whamo Frisbee Flying Disc up to that of a standard toilet seat lid. I was hanging out this morning having coffee with the bees and they've been testy for days. Quite out of the blue I was stung on the head for standing there minding their business. I decided it was time to head to work after that and from the driveway, thinking about the sting on the top of my head, I looked up where the large nest apparent. I wonder how I didn't see it sooner. 
The nest is about fifty feet up in the storm-torn maple tree that hangs over the tiny Easter apiary. Can you see it there? (just left of top dead center) Last year Isis sat in the little shady cloister behind the chair.
The idea behind the trap-out is to engineer a method by which foraging bees of a colony ensconced within a wall or other structure where their presence is unwelcome are able to exit their nest but aren't able to return. Within eight to ten weeks the economy of the feral colony is gradually interrupted to point where the ensconced queen will eventually cease egg-laying and vacate the occupied structure. In the mean time, the beekeeper provides an empty hive body that holds a frame of day-old eggs and is otherwise filled with drawn comb so that the returning foragers that are at that point "trapped-out" have a place to shelter and the motivation and means to rebuild via the frame of fresh (queen-worthy) eggs. The cone is fabricated from a piece of 1/8" mesh hardware cloth and installed over the original entrance by means of a makeshift flange. This is usually a piece of plywood drilled to allow the mesh cone to slip through the front and then be stapled and caulked on the back. The flange or adapter is then caulked or otherwise sealed around the edges so that bees aren't able to push their way back in through the original entrance. Because of the optical illusion of many, many holes created by the mesh cone and because of the force of habit to return the location of the original entrance the returning bees are unable to navigate their way back into their nest and are instead prompted by the smell of brood and eventually queen-rightness of the surrogate hive body. For this reason the "empty" hive body or bait box should be placed as close to the entrance of the ensconced colony as possible, preferably touching so that returning foragers can walk, and not fly, into the replacement hive. 
It was the evening of March 28th, 2012 when Mrs. called through a network of people (mostly, my brother) who have access to me on weeknights because I stubbornly refuse to carry a cell phone. She wanted to tell me that Brigid had swarmed earlier that day causing a ruckus at the neighbors and the bees were last seen clustered on the rail fence between us and the Yates' house. I asked her to check for me if they were still there, as it was near 9:30 at night and I was just turning in. Sure, enough! they hadn't moved on yet and would stay put throughout the night time. I dropped everything a drove back the 70 miles to Strasburg and this is what it looked like when I found them an hour and half later. 
I spent a couple hours and never seemed to have enough hands to scoop up a swarm in the dark, otherwise a low-hanging fruit because I didn't have to go up on a ladder in the dark trying to manage a brush, a bucket and flashlight at he same time. Even after getting the majority of the cluster into a hive, and relatively certain of having captured the queen it was difficult to sleep that night for all the excitement. I was up early and unplugged the bung at the entrance of the hive releasing the cluster into the warm day to forage. As the sun exposed the front door of their new home the bees gathered and started fanning their Nasonov glands into the air in the manner they do to attract any stragglers of the swarm to the new digs. According to my very limited experience of bee wrangling that was pretty much their approval of the terms of lease and the agreement was sealed. My wife took this picture of the victorious beekeeper and I went to my day job confident of having just expanded my apiary by 100%!
No sooner than I arrive at work and Mrs. calls to inform me that the new colony were bearding at the entrance. I couldn't tell her whether this was normal or not and asked that she keep an eye on them as best she could. The behavior in this instance made me uneasy. A hour later she called again after having run an errand. The bearding had grown since and even she had the impression by then that they had no intention of staying. She described the cluster at the entrance in terms of a tub draining in reverse, and as she watched while on the phone with me the bees began leaving the hive in droves and filling the air! Time to beg out of work and stage an interception! 
Seventy miles and another hour and half of gasoline and traffic I'm back in Strasburg. The bees have taken up in a bush very near where they were the night before. Sensible people, perhaps, might've allowed the swarm to escape at this point but I was galvanized in my resolve to catch them again by the fact that the queen in the initial swarm of the season - this queen - was my survivor stock, the queen that reared a colony so strong that they decided to expand; and second year queen at that (generally regarded as their most productive season). Daylight was a huge improvement over trying to determine any sense from the swarm within the beam of a flashlight. This time I had the foresight to make up a baggie feeder of sugar syrup to hold them over for the couple days they were to spend confined to hive before I was able to make it back to the valley again. The sugar gives workers the nutrition they need to start drawing comb and stimulates the queen to begin laying. Once there were some eggs for the house bees to watch after the swarm will stay pretty well put. I think the proximity to the mother hive is what prompted them to abscond. 
I've gotta make this quick because I've been trying to get around to an update for weeks! We've divested of the U.S. housing boondoggle and are in a rented 3 bedroom house in Strasburg, Virginia 10 miles west and over the Massanutten mountain. The move has been arduous and is still not entirely complete, but the good news - and this is what I've been holding off to report - is that Brigid has survived our very mild winter, where the top bar, then Isis, and finally Lada all succumbed. Moving the conservation hive wasn't nearly as difficult as I had anticipated. Although a two-man job, it took more time to figure out the ratcheting tie straps used to secure the roof, supers and base together with a couple of makeshift handles than it did to hoist the whole caboodle into the back of Pop's pickup truck, secure it and drive it over the mountain. 
Surprise! Chuck called out of the blue this afternoon with a swarm clustered in a low-hanging branch on his land in the Fort, wanting to know if I knew anything about capturing a feral swarm of bees. Which is hilarious, because I've never even definitively seen a swarm of bees. But, "what's the worst that can happen?" I asked myself. I can get the living shit stung out of me and fall off a ladder backward. That's what!
