I have only three hives left. The last hive from last year died a couple of weeks ago. The hive boxes are out there empty and abandoned. I plan to split a hive or two if they are strong enough so I just leave them.<\/p>\n
I noticed lots of bees in one of the abandoned hives. The colony died last fall. I guessed at the time that there must be some honey left in it and the other colonies were robbing it.<\/p>\n
I went back over the weekend and this hive is full of bees. I popped the top and there were solid bees inside. They are cleaning out the hive and bringing back pollen. I might have captured an early hive, or there was a queen supersedure in the next hive. This happens when the bees make a new queen. I think that a hive might have made several queens and one went next door and took up housekeeping. This seems very unlikely, but is possible. Somehow I got a free hive without having to work for it.<\/p>\n
I now have swarm traps up in the trees in the front of the house. My brother made one 4 frame nuke for me and I had a 5 frame nuke. I filled these with nice old honeycomb and poured a little lemon oil on them. This is supposed to attract a swarm. With luck I can have a couple of more hives by the end of June and perhaps I’ll be able to get honey from them in the fall.<\/p>\n
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I have only three hives left. The last hive from last year died a couple of weeks ago. The hive boxes are out there empty and abandoned. I plan to split a hive or two if they are strong enough so I just leave them. I noticed lots of bees in one of the abandoned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.westnyackhoney.com\/bees\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}