Blueblood's 1st Swarm of 2014

[blueblood]

Hey Hoosiers, swarm season appears to have commenced!  The cool weather last week has delayed them by a few days.  I returned late from a track meet and obeyed the gut feeling to check the yard.  Sure enough, I saw a cluster on a low lying white pine right in front of two nuc boxes I sat out as swarm traps.  Figures doesn't it?  They really like clustering on pine trees.  I have captured many from pine trees and glad that I have several in the back field.  With much warmer temps tomorrow, I am predicting a few swarm calls.  May is my favorite bee keeping month!  I will see if I can find the queen tomorrow after they have settled in.  I can narrow it down to a few hives if I see the queen being familiar enough with what each current queen looks like since I only have 10 hives at this point.

[BoilerJim]

Wow. That looks huge!

[jb63]

Nice catch blue.Good thing you checked your yard.

[blueblood]

Jim, it was bigger than a normal package for sure.  Jb, I was going to wait until morning but was too nervous I would miss them by the time I returned home from a morning appointment.  I hope to get some swarm calls tomorrow!

[Jen]

Nice Blue! They really like cedar trees too 

[riverbee]

LOL!!!..........

love it!!! dark, flashlight, great swarm capture!!! 

great video and pix blue, enjoyed!

[tmrschessie]

Very well done Dave....you gotta love it when they fall into your lap....Tom

[G3farms]

Nice swarm to start the season off with!!

Glad you got them put up in the dark.

[kebee]

 Nice swarm you got there, hope they make you a lot of honey this year.

Ken

[efmesch]

I can't predict what you can look forward to as the swarming season progresses, but if it's anything like what's been going on in my neighborhood, you can look forward to a lot of them.  It used to be that April was the only month for swarms here.  This year my first swarm arrived in February and my latest swarm (so far) arrived this past Friday, May 2nd.  That's unheard of!
Keep a count of how many arrive and keep us up to date. 
My blessing to you Dave:  May you have so many swarms that you run out of available equipment. 

[Jen]

Same here Ef, my first swarm came middle of March. I was not ready!

[Bamabww]

Dave, as I've said before; you are a bee magnet. Great pictures as usual as well.

[blueblood]

Thanks Ef!  Very interesting on your early and long swarm season.  Thanks Wayne! 

Moved them to a permanent location this morning and located the queen.  I saw activity in one of my nuc swarm traps today around noon.  I never made it back to check on whether or not it was scouts or another swarm.  I will check tomorrow.

[rrog13]

Very nice!