We are ramped up and ready to go for Swarm Removal season 2013.  Jeff and I are prepared with all our swarm chasing gear, ready to go rescue the bees wherever they may roam.

It has been a very cool spring up until now.  Most would say a "normal" spring.  But with the last few years having been so warm at this time it is strange to have temperatures just now hitting in the 70's.
I checked on the bees over the weekend because we had a special visitor come to see the bees.  Madison a local homeschool student gave me a call and asked if she could come out and check out the operation.  We had a great time ansering all her quesitons and taking a peek at the bees.  We made up feed and made sure the ladies all got something sweet to drink.  this coming weekend I will clean out the "ponds" and make sure they have adequate water supplies as the days begin to get warmer.  

Hopefully we will begin to get lots of swarm calls.  In Southwest Missouri we are just entering Swarm Removal season.  But wiht the cool spring it may be a few more weeks before we see them.  We have the trucks loaded and are ready to go get them when we do get that first swarm removal call.

Today was extraction day.  Meagan and I went out at about 12:30 and began the long process of pulling honey from the hives.  All total we ended up with 7 supers full of the golden nectar.

It was a hot day today, with temperatures in the upper 90's.  Whew we were beat by the time we came in... and we were only 1/2 way done.  Once we got all the bees removed and the boxes brought up to the house, we took the blower to get rid of the rest of them.  Well, at least thats what we thought...  Even after blowing the bees out and giving a quick check of each box just to be sure, we still had about 15 bees sneak into the house with us on the supers.  But the good news was out of 7 supers we only found 4 hive beetles.  That was really good! I have heard horror stories of the little buggers being everywhere when going to extract. 

While we were in the the bee yard we also did a couple of hive manipulations.  Reversing some boxes, putting frames in those that needed it and we also created a NUC out of a queen that was doing poorly.  Why would I creat a nuc with a poorly performing queen you might ask??  Well the answer is simple, observation hive... I took some of her old brood and all of their stores and created a split of one of the MH hives.  This old queen that is not performing will be great to keep a couple fo fmames going for observation hives and I can even take her along for the ride.  That way when the kids want to see the queen, we will be able to show her, and if she happen's to accidentally get killed in the process, it would be such a loss.

So as evening rolled in we began the extraction process.  It took all evening...  I was warned by my friend Val that it didn't matter if you were extracting 4 frames or 100, the process still took just as long.  Why is this???  Well there is this crazy thing called setup and then this other very strange behavior called clean up. We extracted just under 70 frames, and the knife I used worked well, but maybe for my birthday or Christmas I will get a hot uncapping knife and that will make the process faster and easier.

Checked on the bees this weekend.  They all seem to be doing great.  Have one hive though that never seemed to get off the ground this spring.  You can see it in the middle of the picture of the whole bee yard just to the right.  It is the one that is still a single deep.

So, came up with a plan for it.  I am going to pull the queen and a couple of frames of brood then put it in a nuc box to keep the queen, that way we can have a queen for observation hives.  I will then drop two new frames of brood into the box from one of my good producers.  The MHs seem to be doing very well with the honey and they are also fairly gentle, hmmmmmmm.

I think we are now somewhere in the neighborhood of about 400lbs of honey!!!  Wow, it will be nice to have all of that to share with all of you this year.  

After I was done checking on the hives and snapping pictures of the apiary, I went over by the kiddie pool that i setup for the bees to gather water.  Picture is at the right.  There were a lot of bees getting a drink there...  Yea!!!  I am so glad they have easily adopted the "watering hole" I created for them.  I have another kiddie pool too, but at present it seems to have a leak.  Hopefully, I can fix that this coming weekend.

Speaking of this weekend, we are looking to extract some of that fine Ozarks honey this weekend too.  Hopefully, we can pull some off the hives and start bottling to sell.

Went in to check hives again today and opened up the first hive...  Here is the results; plenty of bees, very obvious signs of a queen and 20 frames that look just like the one in the picture.  If they weren't fully capped like the one in the picture, they were certainly close.  We are discussing entering a frame or two into the fair.  If we win then we can say that we have award winning honey.  

So about the monster swarm...  Well i am happy to report that they are doing great!  I checked on them today and what a wonderful site to see what the girls do when you mess up and forget to put 3 frames into their respective slots in the hive.  Well these good little girls went an pulled down three beautiful combs from the inner cover. It was amazing, beautiful straight, stark white comb.  Good girls!  I never would have imagined them using the inner cover as a top bar.  How funnny, and no, I dont expect to get that lucky ever again.  they could have just as easily put in some nice cross comb for me.  I was able to carefully cut it off the inner cover and then gently put it into some deep frames that I had on hand.  Wired it in and I think that all is now good.  they should re attach it to the true top bar and no one will ever know. As sheer luck would have it, as I was getting ready to cut the last piece of comb, I thought to myself...   I might want to get the bees off just in case this one has the queen. It had the most bees on it and I thought it sure would be difficult  to spot her with the light fading and I really didn't want to kill her.  Plus I hadn't sen her on any of the other frames I examined or the two frames that I had already cut off.  Well as I picked up the top cover to get ready to brush the bees off  guess what... I just happened to glance right at her.  Wow, total fluke, but there she was.  So I snapped a couple of pictures of her.  If you look you can see she is just left of center in the picture at right.  So no question now she didn't get killed with the fire extinguisher.

Have I mentioned before that it is swarm season?  Maybe I have also mentioned that they dont usually stick around long...

Well, just incase we needed a subtle reminder of either one, today gave us just that.  Well being the day after Mothers Day and being the favorite son (Ok, so I am the only son, but shhh, dont tell my mom), I thought that I should take my mom to lunch.  Now, before you go acusing me of being a day late, you need to understand that she was out of town yesterday.  So anyway, we are having lunch when I get this swarm call.  Sounds like the perfect storm, er, swarm.  It's about the size of a basketball and about five feet off the gound on a young maple tree.  So I am very excited.  I call Jeff and let him know that we have a live one...  He gathered up his equipment and headed that way.  Unfortunately, when he called to double check on the way they were already gone.  You can see from the pictures that this swarm was just beautiful and looked to be very easy to catch.  Oh well, better luck next time.

This might be a good time to remind everyone what areas we cover for swarm removal.
Ozarks Honey Company covers these Missouri towns
and the nearby areas for bee swarm removal:

Battlefield - Billings - Boaz - Bois D’Arc - Brookline - Chadwick - Clever - Diggins
Fordland - Forsyth - Fremont Hills
Galena - Highlandville - Linden - Marshfield - McCracken
Nixa - Northview
Oak Grove Heights - Oldfield - Ozark
Republic - Rogersville
Saddlebrooke - Seymour - Sparta - Strafford - Willard

as well as the following Missouri Counties: Greene, Christian, Webster

Dont forget the swarm removal hotline - 417-501-5009

Here is a large swarm that I got a removal call on just north of Springfield, Missouri in Greene County .  When I got there this morning the swarm had actually split into two clusters with bees on two adjacent branches, one slightly above the other.  In the pictures above the smaller cluster was just above the 2nd picture which is of the larger cluster.  They were neatly tucked into a lilac shrub.

These pictures do not do this swarm justice as (although you can't see it in the picutre) the second larger cluster is about 8 inches in diameter and about 2 feet long.  The smaller cluster is about 6 inches in diameter and 1 foot long.  The size alone is what interested me in catching this particular swarm, since it was a bit far from my home. Based on the call I knew this swarm was not a samll one, so I prepared a hive body and a super to be able to hold the large quantity of bees.

Upon examining the swarm, I could immediatly tell these bees were not acting in the normal doscile manner of most swarms.  They were very touchy and became even more so as I proceded to remove them from the shrub.  Aparently the homeowner, before calling me, had sprayed them with a fire extinguisher trying to get them to leave the location.  I am thinking that may be what led them to be so aggravated. This is the first swarm that I actually put my bee suit on to get into a box. See me in the picture below.

In the picture you can see all the bees on top of the hive surrounding the small twig that I just placed on top.  At this point the hive box already had a large amount of the bees inside, and there were still twice as many on the shrub.  Most interesting was that although they seemed to like the hive body and moved in there were not large amounts of bees fanning their Nasonov glands as most swarms do.  The majority simply climbed inside and checked out the boxes.  The rest, well they kept trying to tell me that they didn't want to be bothered and you can see them in the pisture above flying arround, not happy with my presence.

After about 3 hours of cutting, removing, more cutting and removing I finally got the most of the mass into their new home.  I covered the hive and let it sit next to the bush so that all the straglers could come and join thir sisters.  I then came back later in the evening to collect the boxes and the colony.

First, the lunch...  We are members of the Ozarks Area Beekeepers Association and I am also the club's newsletter editor.  Today was the clubs annual spring outing and potluck.  We started the day off with a quick trip to Lowes to pickup the kids "Build & Grow" projects.  If you have not taken your child, grandchild, niece, nephew to Lowes' "Build & Grow Clinic", it is definitely worth checking out.  The kids love it, they get to build something out of wood and it is a great bonding experience as well as confidence builder.  They have it every other week and it is well worth the gas to build a free project and see the smile and satisfaction on your child face when they are done.  

After Lowes we headed out to the Brooks' farm where the beekeeping lunch was going on.  When we arrive everyone was getting ready to eat lunch.  So we arrive at the perfect time (in my opinion).  :)  Yum, the food was delicious, and there was more than enough to go around.  If anyone questions the minimal dues paid to join the association, this lunch alone makes it worth every penny, but we also have a Christmas dinner too!!  

Now for the bees... Well after gorging ourselves on all the wonderful food, we headed out to Jack's bee yard.  There were about 60 people in attendance this year and it was great to see everyone.  Lots of good quesitons were asked and there was plenty of help for the new beekeepers. My wife got her first real bee experience.  She was the phtographer for the occasion and some of the pictures she took are part of this post.  Tracy has become a wonderful photographer and her pictures adorn the web site.  About 95% of the pictures you see on the site are hers.  It was amazing to see her work the camera around the bees.  She was right in the middle of all the action, without a veil or bee suit I might add.  Everyone kept commenting on, isn't she afraid of getting stung, or she is going to get stung...  Something like that.  Well I am proud to say that she didn't not even once, and she was within 2 feet of the hives some of the time.

Lastly, the swarms...  Well as luck would have it, this week has been very busy for bee swarm removal.  We have had at least three calls for bee swarm removal this week alone.  Jeff seems to think that it is due to the pressure changes from incoming storms and I would tend to agree.  Just last night we had a storm move in and our bees were bearding heavily on the front of most of the hives.  It is amazing almost like they want to watch the storm roll in.  

Well we had bee swarm removal calls in Greene county, and another bee swarm removal call in Christian county this week.  It has been a great month for beekeeping in general, but we love saving the bees and getting the swarm removal calls is always fun.

Here is a great picture of what we will call Ali's swarm (pictured left).  Ali called me about 8:30 last night.  I think that after talking to her for about 1/2 an hour she wished that she had call Ozarks Honey Company first.  She was a bit set back by the other beekeepers that she had already spoken to.  Thank God that she had not given up on the idea of saving the bees all together.  

The previous beekeepers had given her some sadly wrong information and tried to charge her an outrageous fee to come rescue her swarm.  I think the first beekeeper tried to scare her into having him come out by telling her that she probably had africanized bees. This is just plain wrong for a beekeeper in the Springfield area to tell anyone just to go get a swarm. A quick look at this map: http://www.ars.usda.gov/Research/docs.htm?docid=11059&page=6  should quickly dispel any one who thinks that we have africanized bees in any Missouri county.  I am not sure if this beekeeper was simply uniformed or just trying to make sure that Ali had him come and get the bees.  The second keeper she spoke with told her that it was going to cost her $200 for him to come out and get the swarm.  Seriously???  I can not even believe that.  I have heard of some beekeepers asking for some gas money if the travel was far for them, but $200...  OMG! That's nuts!  At the Ozarks Honey Company we NEVER charge to come and get a swarm.  We always promise fast, free bee swarm removal.  If we can't come get your bees for any reason, we will always tell you up front and do our best to find you a resource to help.

So, here we are this morning, I had already decided that Jeff Maddox was going to get these bees.  I simply am out of equipment at the moment and Jeff is needing the bees, plus there is also a hive in the walls of Ali's house.  So, the two together make it a good fit for him. Jeff called me a little after 8:00am and informed me that he had already gotten two other swarm calls this morning.  Geez, must be the weather...  So, I catch up with Jeff in south Springfield, helping rescue a beekeepers own swarm from a tree right above her hives.  After rescuing her bees from the cold day, we were off to get Ali's swarm and diagnose how difficult it is going to be to remove the hive.

Captured the swarm on the north side of Springfield in Green County, Missouri with relative ease.  The news for the homeowner on the swarm was not quite as good.  The bees were definitely in the walls of the house and would require extraction.  Jeff was able to provide them with a suitable alternative to ripping the side off the house in that he could go to get the bees from the inside.  This seemed like an amicable solution to the unfortunate situation. So, here is the recap...  Three swarm calls and one with a hive in the wall too.  As they say, when it rains... It pours.  Trust me that is not a complaint, we love to rescue bee swarms.

Just getting off work today, and got a call about a swarm in Ozark.  So I called my wife and gave her the good news.  I suggested that the whole family go and I rushed home, loaded up the bee equipment and all the girls.  The girls were so excited to go and do a swarm removal.

We got to Ozark just as the sun was beginning to go down and everyone was hungry.  So a quick stop at the local Wendy's to get everyone some fuel and we were off to catch our swarm.

It seemed like we drove all over Christian County to get to the swarm.  We pulled in the driveway and were greeted by the nicest family.  It felt a bit like the fireman pulling up to the fire.  Well, there they were just as described, a volleyball size swarm about 8 feet off the ground.  It was the family's first time to see a bee swarm up close, so I wasted no opportunity  to show my beekeeping skills by sticking my fingers right into the swarm.  They of course were so impressed. :)  Yeah, right.  I think that my wife said something like, "stop messing arround before you get stung."  So, off to work I went.

After several attempts to get the bee box up next to the swarm, I finally decided that I was going to have to hold it myself.  I climbed up the ladder and just held the box up into the swarm until my arms felt like they were going to fall off. When I pulled the box down there were plenty of bees that had decided that the box was a suitable home and had already gone down inside.  I didn't want to miss the opportunity to show the girls, so I pulled the box all the way down to the ground.  Everyone was so amazed to see the the bees with their tails up in the air fanning their nasonov gland.  This is the bees way to "call" the others to come and investigate the new home. Nasonov is a pheromone that the bees use to orient forager bees back to the hive entrance.  In a swarm situation they use the pheromone to attract the other bees into the new hive.

After several more "lifts" of the hive up to get more bees in, I decided it was time to hurry up the process and began brushing bees into the box. This worked very well with the exception of having them flying into my face, making it difficult to stay close to the task at hand.  I put my bee veil on to make the job a bit less uncomfortable.  Tracy even got into helping me brush the bees into the hive.  It was a very fun family experience and I hope the young girls remember it for years.  Darkness was approaching, so I finished up brushing them and set the hive box on top of the ladder to hopefully collect the stubborn ladies that just would not come off the branch.  It took about another fifteen minutes before they finally realized that their sisters had left and where they went.  Once all the bees were safely in, I put the lid on, strapped it all together and loaded them in the car.  

It was a fun evening, and I think all the kids really liked watching me catch a swarm of bees.  I am going to have to take them out in the bee yard from time to time to show them the swarm that they caught and how they are doing.

Well, the bees were a big hit at Classical Conversations (Liv's home school).  She got up and sang the whole 1st verse and chorus to "I'm In Better Hand's Now".  It was just amazing!  I am so proud of her, she said, "well, I was a bit nervous dad, but I just sang anyway."  How awesome, spoken like a truly beyond her yeas 5yr old.  Tracy finished up the song, while Liv did her own "interpretive" dance to the music, then joined back in on the final chorus.  It was great.  

Then we talked about the family bees.  It sure is fun telling everyone that we have over 1/2 a million bees.  The questions are always so fun to answer.  It always impresses me how much people know about bees, but I must admit, the parents at CC were especially "in the know."  If any of you are reading this, you certainly do your homework when it comes to all natural ingredients, like honey.  Although it wasn't the reason that we took the bees, I think that we have several new customers from the presentation. Livy sure enjoyed showing "her" bees off to her friends, and they loved checking them out just a much.  It was a very fun time.  Lots of compliments and questions.

Stopped by the Home Depot on the way to the house and they had 6~8' Japanese Maples on sale for $80.  So, of course we had to go and get one.  But first I had to get all those girls back into the hive.  It was so nice, Tracy cme to help me.  I really liked that!  She has been showing more interest in the bees and wanting to learn about taking care of them.  So, I was really excited when she asked if she could go over to the hives with me while I put the frame from the observation hive back in.  I am going to have to get her suited up soon, so she can look down in a hive while I do an observation.

Where is the queen?  Well, after looking for her yesterday in the parent hive of the split and not finding her.  I can only assume that she either left with a swarm, or is in the nuc that I made from the hive.  As it was getting late in the day and we needed to go if we wanted to purchase that tree.  I quickly put the frame back into the hive and will have to check on the split tomorrow.