Caught a Honey Bee Swarm Today

[Mows4three 825]

Not my line of work, but I have a buddy who keeps bees.  He has experienced colony collapse year after year due to hive mites.  As of yesterday he was down from a peak of 24 hives that he kept to only two.  

 

Right after lunch today another friend sent me a text and asked if I knew anyone that kept bees.  He had a swarm in a hemlock tree in his front yard. I connected him with my other buddy and hightailed it out to watch the capture.  Again, not my line of work, but I have an interest in bees and wanted to see how a swarm capture takes place.

 

The following photos illustrate the process.  These bees were not aggressive and did not have a hive of their own to defend so my buddy deemed them very docile.  You’ll see him lighting the smoker, cutting the branches that held the swarm, then dropping the swarm into an open hive with a few frames removed.  We got lucky and the big clump of bees held the queen.  Once she was down in the hive he put the lid on and the scent she was giving off (pheromone) attracted the bees outside of the hive to enter the hive by walking right up the landing ramp.  

 

After 15 minutes the majority of the bees had entered the hive.  He plugged the entrance, loaded the hive in his truck and went home.  Now he has three working hives.  

 

Enjoy the pictures and watch the video, if I can get it to upload.  

 

Cheers!

 

Dave

[Tractorhead 8,610]

Great the Swarm is saved!

[Pullstart 59,713]

That is so cool!  I have an interest in bee keeping for honey but haven’t ever jumped in.  Thanks for sharing!

[ZXT 2,394]

Very cool! I have a bee hive at my house. I live on a hill, and on part of it there is about a 3x3x4 box dug into the side with a door on it, meant for storing firewood. They got into that and have been there for around 7 years now. They're extremely docile. I can mow and weed-eat right up to it and they don't bat an eye. 

 

 

[Pullstart 59,713]

1 hour ago, ZXT said:

Very cool! I have a bee hive at my house. I live on a hill, and on part of it there is about a 3x3x4 box dug into the side with a door on it, meant for storing firewood. They got into that and have been there for around 7 years now. They're extremely docile. I can mow and weed-eat right up to it and they don't bat an eye. 

 

 

do you harvest any honey from them?

[bc.gold 3,399]

Only the inexperienced Apiarist lose bees due to hive mites, once discovered maybe chemically eradicated. The real culprits are the commercial pollinators who rent hives out.

 

After the pollinating season is over you'll see scores of ads offering complete hives of bees for sale, save your money as these hives rarely survive. The bees have been poisoned, 40 percent of U.S. bee colonies died in past year.

 

With all the honeybee deaths over the last decade, it seems like more bees would be an uncontroversial good. But one new study found that these expensive, hard-working commercial bees are killing off the ones who work for free.

 

The problem lies in the diseases and parasites commercial bees are introducing to their wild relatives. The BBC reports:

 

 

[bc.gold 3,399]

IMO the best pesticide free honey come from hives placed in the forests sold as fireweed honey. Even the snippet from an ad found online is deceptive as fireweed is a wild flower.

 

Fireweed Honey:

Fireweed Honey is considered the Champaign of all honey. It is a rare honey known around the world for its medicinal qualities, and its light sweet taste. Our Fireweed Honey is an incredibly clear white, and takes a long time to crystalize, indicating that it is one of the purest you can find. It is produced by our bees out in the fireweed fields.

 

Fireweed is not only the Yukon’s territorial flower, but it is the first thing to grow in a forest after a forest fire. It takes the desolate black forest, and puts life back into it with its brilliant hot pink color. There isn’t anything more beautiful than a field of Fireweed in a black, burned forest with swarms of honey bees brining it all back to life. The best part is that the beautiful, but burned forest can produce the nectar that the bees transform into one of the best honeys in the world. We really hope you get the opportunity to try some of this amazing honey.

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by bcgold

[bc.gold 3,399]

Bee keepers who have registered their hives with the State or provincial inspector are able to purchase 100% pure ethanol alcohol.

 

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by bcgold

[bottjernat1 2,189]

Holy moly id be dead. im allergic! 

[bc.gold 3,399]

1 hour ago, bottjernat1 said:

Holy moly id be dead. im allergic! 

So true, one bee keeper buddy is highly allergic while another practices.

 

What Is Bee Sting Therapy?

 

A type of apitherapy (from the Latin api, meaning bee), bee sting therapy involves administering bee venom through live bee stings or injections at specific points on the body. Healers have used bee sting therapy for more than 5,000 years as a treatment for a range of health conditions including headaches, joint pain, and skin rashes.

 

Bee venom, also called apitoxin, contains many biologically active compounds, amino acids, and enzymes that have anti-inflammatory properties, alleviate pain, and promote healing. There are also immune-modulating effects on the body from the bee sting itself. This response is theorized to be the reason for its therapeutic effects in certain conditions caused by an imbalanced immune system response (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, eczema

 

Today, bee venom is being investigated to treat the following conditions

• Rheumatoid arthritis (RA)
• Parkinson's disease
• Alzheimer's disease
• Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease)
• Multiple sclerosis (MS)
• Eczema
• Psoriasis

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by bcgold

[bc.gold 3,399]

Last year, My buddy from Hope B.C.,

 

0 honey production this year.  lost 55 out of 58 hives from last year. All others in Hope lost 100%, due to the fraser valley pollinator who has invaded us. He lost all his too and so far is not back in Hope. I have rebuilt up to 15 and made 7 for another local who lost all.  

 

Don is a serious bee keeper, he raises queens. Any worker can be turned into a brood queen.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 4, 2020 by bcgold

[bc.gold 3,399]

Free bees, build  swarm trap then add a scent to attract a swarm, another way to get free honey is to follow a bee, no joke.

 

 

 

[Mows4three 825]

Old timers around these parts used to follow a bee to the hive tree then cut it down at night to rob the honey.  I’m no proponent of their technique because it almost always resulted in killing the bee colony. 

 

We we ended up putting out a five frame nuc today as a swarm trap at my place. 

 

Cheers!

 

Dave

[bc.gold 3,399]

6 hours ago, Mows4three said:

We we ended up putting out a five frame nuc today as a swarm trap at my place. 

 

Cheers!

 

Dave

 

Good luck with the trap.

Edited May 5, 2020 by bcgold

[ZXT 2,394]

13 hours ago, pullstart said:

do you harvest any honey from them?

Nope, never have. I don't care much for honey anyways. 

[bc.gold 3,399]

The Honey purchased in the stores is blended from various sources, i haven't used Honey in years.

 

It is like honey in the bank, according to investigators who are tracking Chinese exports of bogus honey to the United States (US). China is the largest producer of honey in the world, but much of China’s honey production is tainted with pesticides, antibiotics, and heavy metal contamination.

 

Chinese honey was banned from the European Market by the EU in 2002. in 2001, The US imposed a 300 percent tariff on Chinese honey to protect American beekeepers from unfair competition from China, but Chinese honey is still finding its way onto the American market.

 

Honey is big business in America, with more than 400 million pounds of the sweet stuff being consumed here each year, including 200 million pounds that goes into the production of processed foods. Only 48 percent of that honey is American made.

 

The other 52 percent comes from 41 countries around the world. That makes the American honey market a tempting target for predators bent on selling contaminated or adulterated honey to American consumers. One such operation netted the perpetrators more than $80 million from selling Chinese honey to unsuspecting US businesses before they were shut down by agents from the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. Many such smuggling operations go undetected due to manpower issues.

 

American companies are not always innocent bystanders. Some very well-known honey packers are knowingly purchasing Chinese honey from third country middle men and reselling it on the American market. Industry sources indicate that as much as one-third of all the honey sold in the US may actually be illegally imported Chinese production.

 

Honey is a unique because it is the only food product that does not go bad. It can be left out in a closed container, refrigerated, or frozen, but it never sours or ferments. Because of its reputation as a healthy sweetener, it is often used to replace regular sugar or sugar substitutes, and parents who would never give their children regular sugar have no qualms about giving them honey, because they believe it is a safe, natural product. Industry sources claim that may not be true all the time.

 

In addition to the contamination and adulteration issues, the Chinese product is also missing a vital ingredient that gives honey one of its most beneficial characteristics: bee pollen. Pollen is the powdery stuff that comes off when the stamen of a flower is touched. The pollen is inadvertently collected by worker bees during the process of collecting nectar from the flowers. Pollen is also the stuff that makes allergy sufferers miserable. One of the traditional remedies for pollen allergies is to feed allergy patients raw, local honey containing pollen from the same area. This is thought to desensitize allergic patients to the allergens.

 

The pollen is also what makes some honey cloudy. When the honey is a clear amber color, the chances are that the pollen has been removed. Some honey packers filter their product to make it look more attractive, and to prevent the honey from crystallizing when refrigerated. Others leave the pollen in the honey because some consumers like the texture of crystallized honey. Chinese honey makers process their honey to remove the pollen but not for aesthetic reasons. They remove the pollen because pollen can be used to identify the source of the honey.

Pollen: Honey’s Sweet Fingerprints

There are more than 350,000 different plant species, each of which produces a unique pollen type and it turns out that it is relatively easy to identify the different pollens because all of the useful ones have been cataloged by melissopalynologist, scientists who study pollen in honey. By identifying the pollen in a given sample, scientists can pinpoint where that honey came. from.

 

Pollen-free honey is a problem for food scientists because, without the pollen, it is impossible to determine where the honey came from and what kinds of nectar went into that batch of honey. That is important to consumers because high quality honey now sells for more than $50 per pound in boutique food stores. Removing the pollen enables packers to sell cheap imported honey at a premium price. It also enables Chinese honey makers to smuggle their honey into the US.

 

A recent survey by Texas A&M researchers found that as much as 75 percent of the samples tested had been laundered to remove the pollen. This makes it virtually impossible for scientists to determine the origin of specific batches of honey, preventing regulators from tracking down and interdict honey smuggling operations.

 

More importantly, from a scientific point of view, it is important to know where honey comes from because different countries have different standards regulating pesticide use and the treatment of hives with antibiotics. Knowing the country of origin allows legitimate importers to test honey batches to ensure that they are not adulterated with chemicals, but that is very difficult to do if the testers don’t know which chemicals to test for.

 

Beekeeping is a very low margin, high risk industry. Commercial beekeepers earn most of their revenue from selling honey, not from pollination services. In order to continue providing pollination services, they have to be able to sell their honey at competitive prices without being undercut by cheap foreign honey. The continuing influx of the cheap Chinese product is undermining the financial viability of US beekeeping operations by forcing down the wholesale price of honey below the levels that American beekeepers need to operate.

 

If beekeeping becomes a money-losing business in the U.S., there will soon be fewer hives and fewer bees,” according to Vaughn Bryant, a Texas A&M anthropologist, who is also a melissopalynologist. “Without them…many of our food crops would not get pollinated. The result might be oranges or apples costing $5 each because so few would be produced without bees to pollinate the flowers.”

 

In the meantime, it is honey in the bank as China continues to export bogus honey to the U.S. amassing huge profits for some entrepreneurs, and jail time for others.

 

By Alan M. Milner

Edited May 7, 2020 by bcgold

[formariz 11,849]

Pretty interesting and educational thread. Many thanks. @Mows4three @bcgold

[bc.gold 3,399]

1 hour ago, formariz said:

Pretty interesting and educational thread. Many thanks. @Mows4three @bcgold

 

Another fun fact, if you have favourite outdoor tree to pee on, soon you'll see honey bee's lapping it up, don't worry your sugar intake is fine it's the salt their after.

[bc.gold 3,399]

Swarms  that take low to the ground are noted for their nasty disposition, Boom ( Boomhower ) and I retrieved a nested swarm from one of those cement road barriers which are hollow. We cut the comb out placing it inside a super for transport.

 

This hive turned out to have nasty occupants, they did not need to be provoked to sting.

 

One day Boom was out cutting firewood and brought home an eight foot section of a hollow tree in which bees had nested, being allergic to bee's he called me to open up the tree.

 

Using the chainsaw was able to tell when the blade reached  open space inside the hollowed out tree, then using a wedge cut from wood was able to spread the tree open. Was a bit messy, but I managed to scoop out all the honey and brood comb, fortunately the queen was somewhere in the transfer.

 

If the queen for some reason has to be replaced, if the new queen is purchased she'll come in a small wooden box with a screen, the new queen is placed in a fresh supper with news paper covering the hole from the bottom supper.

 

By the time the bees have chewed through the paper they have become accustomed to the new queens smell and readily accept her as their own. Had the paper not been placed as a deterrent of passage they would have killed the new queen thinking she was an intruder.

 

It's best to stay away from the hive if the bee;s have been cooped up for several days of bad weather, they don't take kindly to being cooped up.

 

 

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by bcgold

[ohiofarmer 3,157]

  I found a hive starting inside the hollow wall of an old brick house.  The beekeeper set a hive box and made a one way out wire valve of sorts. I hope he got somewhere with it, but it was taking weeks to do. He did not clean up as promised, so sadly the next time it happens, i probably would set poison .

 

 Unless you guys have some recommendations of how to find a reliable beekeeper in SW Ohio

 

[bc.gold 3,399]

2 hours ago, ohiofarmer said:

  I found a hive starting inside the hollow wall of an old brick house.  The beekeeper set a hive box and made a one way out wire valve of sorts. I hope he got somewhere with it, but it was taking weeks to do. He did not clean up as promised, so sadly the next time it happens, i probably would set poison .

 

 Unless you guys have some recommendations of how to find a reliable beekeeper in SW Ohio

 

 

Honey bees harvest nectar and pollen from a five mile radius of their home, your poison could have adverse affects on other bee colony's within that radius.

 

Before bringing out the big gun, just remember you are what you eat.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by bcgold

[bc.gold 3,399]

1 hour ago, bcgold said:

Unless you guys have some recommendations of how to find a reliable beekeeper in SW Ohio

 

Contact the Apiary inspector for your county he/she will have a list of bee keepers, it's mandatory to register your bees and location with the inspector.

 

Here's a list of inspectors for the State of Ohio.

 

 

 

 

[ohiofarmer 3,157]

On 5/11/2020 at 6:27 PM, bcgold said:

 

Contact the Apiary inspector for your county he/she will have a list of bee keepers, it's mandatory to register your bees and location with the inspector.

 

Here's a list of inspectors for the State of Ohio.

 

 

  Thank you for this. Now I can do the responsible thing because having a bad experience, I think I would talk to the county agent about what to expect out of a responsible bee keeper as it pertains to my property.

 

 

[bc.gold 3,399]

34 minutes ago, ohiofarmer said:

 

  Thank you for this. Now I can do the responsible thing because having a bad experience, I think I would talk to the county agent about what to expect out of a responsible bee keeper as it pertains to my property.

 

I thought you were pulling a leg when you described how said bee keeper was attempting to capture the bees, all he succeeded in doing was to deprive the colony of its workers.

 

Leaving the queen defenceless as she is incapable of even feeding herself let alone look after the brood. What amazes me is the total number of eggs she is capable of laying over a four year life span with just one copulation.

 

The queen can lay as many as 2000 eggs per day.

[ohiofarmer 3,157]

there was really no way to get the queen out of there as the walls to the house are 18 inches thick with a hollow center.  Typical post civil war german farm house....