Swarm, Swarm, Super Swarm

Having bees is an extraordinary thing.  Novels, poetry, music has been written about it, and with good reason -- it is a beauty, alien and strange, dangerous and scary, essential and productive, intelligent and powerful. Pure nature, and so beyond our power and control that it is impossible to contemplate them without enormous respect, a respect that spills over into a respect for all living things.  

Beekeeping teaches a fundamental truth: nature ought not be forced.  The role of the beekeeper is to provide an environment for the bees where they want to stay and do their business. There is a partnership between bee and beekeeper, the beekeeper coaxes and manipulates and teases the circumstances so that bees do what comes naturally in the context of what the beekeeper wants -- its like farming Aikido -- the Zen of Bees.  Provide the ideal circumstances for nature to take place, and it will.  And that goes for all types of farming, with bees its just more immediate and more obvious.

So anyway, our bees are cool.  Did I say that already?

On Saturday Gab and Davide were taking care of Davide's bees down in Sabbio, when they found a swarm -- When a bee colony gets too numerous, they allow another queen to mature, and then half the colony flies away with the new queen to create a new nest, thus a swarm.  They caught the swarm and stored it in a box waiting for a new hive, then came up to our farm to do some checks on our bees. they found ANOTHER swarm!

When bees swarm, they are actually incredibly docile. Without a nest, the bees protect their queen with their bodies, so the mass of bees you see hanging from the trees is just that -- a mass of bees, one on top of the other -- there are no structural elements in that lump, no wax or other branches, just bees.  And they let you touch them.  It is the most incredible feeling -- they vibrate like crazy, its like putting your hand just over a live electrical wire, it almost itches.  To catch the swarm, you actually reach out and pull the mass of bees into a special box.  Many of them will, of course, fly away.  But if you get the queen into the box, then eventually all the other bees will find her and settle into the box themselves.  Takes a few hours of confused bees flying all over, but eventually they settle into their new home.
Video of Gab catching the swarm

So Gab caught the new swarm, and then checked out the original hives.  Sure enough, one was quite weak because it had been divided for the swarm.  That means no honey from that hive or the new one for this year. Rather than lose the honey production, he made Super Swarm.  Not a scary attack of the killer bees sky dark with insects super swarm...in this case a super swarm is a means of re-uniting the separated colony, and making one strong colony from two weak ones.

video of the swarm flying around looking for the queen in the box:

The new swarm is put in the "super", which is the top section of the hive where they make the honey.  The Queen is kept out of the super (the doors that connect them are too small for the queen to pass), so the honey there is free of larvae and other debris of bee life, and is just pure honey.  So, the new swarm is put in the super with 4 sheets of newspaper covering the doors between the super and the hive.  This way, for the first few days, no bee passes from one to the other.  During those days, they get used to each other's smell and proximity, and they chew through the paper.  By the time they are through the paper, they are thinking of each other as family again, and will mingle happily...all except for the queen in the super.  And only one of the two queens can survive.   We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, whether we separate her from the bees and take her off, or whether we let the bees take care of it and choose which one survives, we'll have to see.  Gab has been asking beekeepers on the forums what is the best approach.

And so by the end of the week, we should have a single strong honey producing family rather than two weak ones.

In the process of maintaining the hives, we also scraped down our first little bits of honey. O.M.G.  I have never tasted honey so delicious.  No, really.  I was totally surprised because we always buy local honey from the die hard beekeepers, so I didn't really expect a quality difference. But holy smokes, was there ever.  Maybe its because they are feeding all on wildflowers and we have ALOT of acacia in flower at the moment, or maybe its just because its MINE and the difference is all my head.  But no matter the reason, our honey super duper ROCKS.