“Why did my bees leave?”

Rusty — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:36:08 +0000

Several people wrote in to say they installed a new package of bees only to have all the bees disappear a few days later. They want to know what they did wrong.

First off, having your new bees abscond is not only heartbreaking, it’s expensive. You spent lots of time and money setting up the perfect hive, you’ve waited all winter for your package to arrive, and two days after installation you are left with nothing but an empty wooden box. Sort of like the stock market.

Every time I have seen this happen, the bees were installed on new wood. If the newly installed bees don’t like the real estate, they act like any other swarm. They stick around for a day or two while the scouts go out and look for something more to their liking. When they’ve come to an agreement on their new digs, they leave and you become an empty-nester.

So, what do you do when you have only new wood? The answer is easy: sequester the queen. The package of bees will not leave without their queen, so if the queen can’t leave, the bees will stay and start to build comb. Once the comb-building process has begun—and the hive begins to smell like home—you can release the queen and relax.

I’ve heard people say it’s the smell of new lumber they don’t like, or it’s the glue in plywood, or it’s the odor of paint. But in my opinion, it’s just that the bees decided they could do better somewhere else. Remember, they have no loyalty to the box you just dropped them in. It’s like someone else choosing an apartment for you. Chances are good that while the place may be okay, you would prefer something different. Same with the bees.

One year I had a package abscond from a newly built top-bar hive. Lucky for me, the swarm landed in a nearby shrub and I was able to capture it. I re-installed them in the same hive but I put the queen in an introduction cage and left her there for about ten days. Once several combs were under construction, I re-released the queen and the colony stayed put.

Since then, I always sequester the queen if the wood is new, or I install several frames of used brood comb—the darker the better—to start them off. This is the same type of comb you would use in a bait hive. Even though it looks disgusting, it is full of odors the bees find irresistible. Go figure.

But what about those old combs? Shouldn’t old black combs—which may contain pesticide build-up or disease—be rotated out of the hive? Absolutely. I handle this by using combs that are almost ready to retire, but not quite. For example, if you retire combs after four years, use three-year-old combs for baiting a hive or starting a colony on new wood.

Rusty

Christmas swarm saved by caring homeowner

Rusty — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:37:11 +0000

About two days before Christmas I got an e-mail from an Arizona homeowner about a swarm of bees that were hanging from the eaves of her house. She said the weather had been unusually warm, but just as it started to change for the worse, the swarm of bees arrived. She didn’t want them to die but she didn’t want them to move into her house or yard so she wondered what she could do.

I wrote back and suggested she contact a beekeeper in her area—not an exterminator or pest control company—and see if someone would come and get them. I also told her that a beekeeper might be able to save them by feeding them honey or sugar syrup but that they would almost surely die if left to their own devices. A swarm at this time of year is often known as a “starvation swarm” because, most likely, they were out of food at home so they absconded in a last-ditch effort to save themselves.

Much to my surprise she e-mailed back the next day and said a beekeeper had come to her home and captured the swarm. She also said the beekeeper promised he would do his best to keep them alive. But here’s the clincher: based on what I had written, she had put out sugar syrup for the bees until the beekeeper arrived!

I thought this was one of the sweetest (no pun) and caring things I’ve ever known a non-beekeeper to do. I was so impressed. In my experience, people like to run out and kill swarms—or pay to have them killed—immediately. And here was a complete stranger reading between the lines of my e-mail and feeding sugar syrup to a hoard of insects—stinging insects that can be strange and intimidating, not to mention just plain scary, to a non-beekeeper.

I thought about this incident a lot during the Christmas holiday. It occurred just several days after my daughter told me about a friend of hers who recently had a swarm land on her porch rail. Instead of calling a beekeeper she went to Home Depot, bought a spray can of poison, and emptied it on the bees. My daughter was incensed over this indiscriminate use of pesticide—not only because of the dead bees but because of the unborn twins the woman is carrying. Chances are she was not wearing protective gear and she (and the twins) got a good dose of whatever it was before she was finished. So sad. So unnecessary.

To the lady in Arizona I say “Thank you!” To the lady in Washington I say “Hope your kids are okay.” To everyone else I say, “Call a beekeeper before an exterminator.” Just a little bit of empathy can go a very long way.

Rusty

Honey Bee Suite » absconding

“Why did my bees leave?”

Christmas swarm saved by caring homeowner