The Boojum Beeyard: Relocating a Colony

The weather at the Boojum Beeyard has been mild and beautiful this week. Pretty soon, it will be swarm season. When the colonies come out of their winter clusters and their queens start laying eggs again, the hive populations grow. Then the swarm season begins.

Beekeepers love swarm season, because they can gather new colonies fairly simply. Last year we gathered several swarms, adding to the number of colonies living at Boojum. One of the swarms last year had started setting up their hive in a discarded TV box. Instead of exterminating them, the person who had these bees move into the box at his house called our chief apiculturist, Kurt Merrill. Kurt was able to take the bees safely away. Here are some pictures he took while transferring the colony from the cardboard box and into a hive box in the Boojum Beeyard.

The box was wrapped in mesh to contain the bees and transported to Boojum in a truck:

photo: Kurt Merrill

 A new home has been prepared. Time to put the bees in the empty hive box:

photo: Kurt Merrill

  When the box is opened you can see the freshly built comb inside:

photo: Kurt Merrill

The comb is carefully transferred to the nuc box. The bees can use the honey and the wax to help restart them in their new home.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred to the hive box. See them "bearding" on top of the frames? Also shown are the basic tools of a beekeeper. There's the smoker, which we use to lightly puff smoke over the bees to calm them and mask the smell of alarm pheromone in the air. There's a knife for cutting the comb away from the cardboard to salvage as much of it as possible. Also pictured is the soft brush, which is used to gently brush the bees into their home without harming them.

photo: Kurt Merrill

Most of the bees have been transferred safely to the new hive box. The nuc box full of honeycomb will be left nearby so that the bees can salvage it.

photo: Kurt Merrill

The brood comb from the swarm colony is pressed into the comb built on old frames and placed into the new hive box. This way the bees can save their brood. This comb had queen cells. Do you see the elongated, peanut shell shaped cells that hold developing queen pupa?

photos: Kurt Merrill

Transfer accomplished! The bees are bearding around their new hive, as workers are busy setting up their home inside and fetching honey and wax from the nuc box to their new hive in the Boojum Beeyard!

photo: Kurt Merrill

These bee accepted their new home and stayed with us, adding another colony here at the Boojum Institute!