Swarmageddon 2012

This seems like it'd be a good post for pictures, but I wasn't home when disaster hit.

It was Friday, 5/11, a beautiful day.  Such a beautiful sunny day that my bees decided to take off and move away.  My lovely and productive queen, and tens of thousands of hardworking foragers.  I'm told it was cool to see.  The neighbors thought it was "just like something you'd see on TV."  Apparently there was a vortex of buzzing bees that alighted overnight high up in the neighbors backyard.  The next day they were off to their new home.  No goodbyes, and since they all ate heavily before their journey, not even much honey left.

What is left?  Well there is a little stored honey and pollen and they left a few workers behind to tend the incubating larval brood.  The workers are trying to raise a few of these larvae to be a new queen, which supposedly has an ~80% chance of success.

Now I'm on vacation and when I return in 3 weeks I may have a dead and empty hive, or I'll have a new young queen, with some spacious honeycomb to fill.  Before leaving I took out some of the combs with an incubating queen and put them in a different box with some of the workers.  This was a risky move, because that leaves minimal resources for both boxes.  On the other hand, now they each have a chance of raising a queen, so hopefully one, if not both, will have a laying queen in a few weeks.  Worst case scenario would be that I return to no bees, and cross my fingers that I can catch someone else's escaping swarm.  Best case scenario, both boxes raise a queen but have to fight back from a population too small to make much honey.

Either way this will be a "rebuilding year" for the bees, and a year without a big honey flow for us.