As you know, our bees swarmed a little over a week ago. Thanks to East Village bee keeper Ray Sage, we were lucky to catch the swarm that day. A couple of days later, Ray came back with a proper hive. The weather favored us: it was cold and rainy. Ray and Sara gave the swarm some honey from our old hive and a tub full of sugar water. Now, they had not only a dry and cozy home but also enough food to keep the queen happy and start building cells. Who would want to leave under these conditions?

Sara and Ray with the new hive. The yellow container holds sugar water as food for the bees.

We watched the hives over the week. Our “newbees” finished several portions of the sugar water and also went out to collect nectar and pollen.

Last Sunday, our beekeepers decided to take a look inside the hives. They were curious what progress the swarm bees had made, and they wanted to know whether the old hive had a new queen yet.

Checking the hive

For this planned home-invasion, our bee keepers donned protective gear and started the smoker. It contains wet burlap, paper and dried herbs. This combination produces smoke that does not smell too terrible and calms the bees.

Smoke soothes the bees (photo: Joe O’Connell)

First, the old hive was looked into. It has three levels. The shorter top level holds frames where the bees are supposed to store honey. The two lower taller boxes were full with frames that contained cells with brood: bee larvae at different stages of development and pupae. There were also a number of queen cells. These are larger than regular cells and have the shape a peanut. The larvae inside of these cells are fed a lot of royal jelly every day, a special diet that causes them to develop into queens instead of worker bees.

A frame covered with bees (photo: Joe O’Connell)

Our bee keepers did not find eggs in the cells of the old hive. This is a sign that this hive currently does not have an adult queen. For the colony to survive, the workers need to rear a new queen. This queen has to fly away, mate with drones from a different hive and come back alive. Her early life is pretty dangerous until she is back home. Then however, she’ll be very well sheltered and taken care of around the clock and can live up to 4 years. This mating flight is a mysterious event. Drones congregate in certain places and queens somehow find these congregations. How this happens is still unknown, despite centuries of bee keeping and decades of honey bee research.

The bees are carefully brushed off to reveal the cells and their contents (photos: Joe O’Connell).

A look into the new hive showed encouraging activities: there were newly build cells and some of them contained eggs! Here, the queen was doing her royal duty and her workers were busy. No wonder, that they were drinking so much sugar water every day. They have to make a lot of wax to outfit their hive. When a bee is well fed, it is nice and warm in the hive (91 °F to 97 °F) and she senses the need for it, a worker bee secretes wax scales from glands in her abdomen. This wax is then chewed and mixed with pollen and propolis (a resin) to be ready for building the perfect structure that we know as honey comb.

Wax scales at the abdomen of honey bee workers (photo: Helga Heilmann, BEEgroup, University of Würzburg; www.beephotos.de)

Bees are truly amazing animals. They do so much work, and all of it is well coordinated. Mind you, I am talking about female bees only. The males do nothing. Their only job is to provide the queen bee with millions of sperm for years of laying up to 2000 eggs per day. Knowing that most of them don’t even get to mate, and those that do die in the process, I feel a bit sorry for them.

However, our virgin queens desperately need to mate with drones, otherwise there will be no more worker bees and thus no honey for any of us. Therefore: best of luck to the queens and her mates for a successful wedding flight!

Yesterday evening, while checking on the roses and chatting with a fellow gardener, I suddenly noticed a strange buzz. When I looked up, I saw an amazing sight: a large cluster of bees was hanging from a branch of our crab apple tree. I remembered from my high school biology class that a queen bee must be in the middle of this swarm.

The swarm

This was exciting and a little scary. What should we do? First, we asked our visitors to avoid the area and blocked it off. Bees in a swarm are not at all aggressive, but it was certainly better to be careful.

The two beekeepers of our garden were not available and it was getting late. What now? Fortunately, New York City’s fantastic bee keeping community is ready to help in such an emergency.

A phone call and 15 minutes later, Ray Sage came to the rescue. Ray has been keeping bees for the last 6 years on a rooftop in the East Village and is an experienced swarm capturer. He quickly assessed the situation. The swarm had chosen a low branch and was accessible by stepladder; good. Did we have a hive for them? We improvised one with two spare stackable boxes from our hive, a few empty honey frames and a piece of plywood for a bottom. But how could we get the bees into this contraption? Ray took a large plastic garbage bag and climbed onto the ladder. I helped him to hold the open bag under the swarm. Then, Ray shook the branch. Clumps of bees fell down. Another shake and most of them were “bagged”.

Ray is shaking the bees into a bag

Normally, a beekeeper would wear a protective suit, but here, we were in a hurry. Amazingly, Ray got stung just a couple of times and I didn’t get stung at all, even though there were plenty of bees all over us. These ladies were completely focused on their queen.

Ray brought the bag to our makeshift hive and poured the bees inside. He then quickly put an improvised lid on the box.

The bees are emptied into the box.

A few wooden sticks wedged under the lid generated a space for the bees to get in and out. Since we had not captured all bees from the apple tree, Ray took the bag back and collected a few more. By the time we were ready to put these bees into the box, the ones inside had markedly calmed down.

By now, excitement was growing in our regular hive. The arrival of the new colony had not escaped the attention of our resident bees. Workers were sitting near the entrance with their rear end up. They were guarding their hive against possible intruders. Ray checked for fights, but did not see any. Perhaps, it was too dark by now and the bees were getting cold and sleepy. A short time later, the buzz in the new hive got quieter, bees crawled into the box and not out, and when we checked the area around the apple tree, it was abandoned. The smell of their queen must have guided all bees into their temporary home.

Ray is adjusting the lid on the box to generate an entrance.

Where did these bees come from? We think that the swarm originated from our own hive. Swarming is a normal occurrence during spring. It serves to propagate the colony. Bees may decide that it is time to swarm when their hive becomes crowded. They nurse a new queen and the old queen moves out with about half of her workers. They all fly away, congregate at a temporary site (like our crab apple tree) and send out scout bees to find a suitable place for a new nest. When such a place is found, the bees will move in, build cells and forage, and the queen will begin to lay eggs. Exactly this happened 5 years ago when our first bee colony moved into a little Asian cabinet that decorated one of our garden plots. The colony stayed there all summer long and even survived the winter. Ray was the one who helped transferring these bees into a proper hive.

The cabinet that served as the home for our first colony. The bees flew in and out of a crack between the doors. They were moved to a proper hive the next year (fotos by Hubert Steed).

That year, we gained a colony of bees. Yesterday, we almost lost half of ours. It was lucky that the swarm had not yet left the garden and we found it in time. Ray offered to bring a new hive in a couple of days. Hopefully, the bees will like it and stay with us, our much anticipated honey harvest depends on it.