I discovered the other week that there is a new beekeeper living just around the corner from us. I'm using 'just around the corner' in a relative sense: it is about half a mile if you were to walk along the lanes, less if you were to push through the undergrowth in the wood. It is one of the closer houses to ours. He has lived there for some time, to judge from the continuity of the cars parked outside and the length of time there's been a sign saying Eggs for sale, but is relatively new to beekeeping. A swarm set up house in his compost bin last year, and he decided to keep them rather than simply ring the beekeepers and ask if someone could come and take them away.
I met him at the monthly club meeting, after somebody spotted that we were near neighbours abd introduced us, and I agreed that I'd be willing to go round and give help if required, while warning him that I was not good at swarm control and probably not the best person to learn from. On Monday the call came. Somebody had told him that while he was at work a great cloud of bees appeared over his hive, but then appeared to go in again, so he wasn't sure if his bees had already swarmed or come out for a fly about and then thought better of it. There still seemed to be lots of bees there, but there were also queen cells, though he wasn't sure if they were sealed or not.
I tried to talk him through the options to stop them swarming if they hadn't already, which were to do an artificial swarm if the queen was there and he could find her, or split the brood if the queen could not be found to make two much smaller colonies, which with any luck would then settle down to sort themselves out and not swarm. He didn't have any spare equipment, except for a half size nuc box with no frames, and I advised him that he did need to get hold of a spare hive as soon as possible. Neither of us were free to look at them yesterday, but he suggested hopefully Wednesday. I admitted I would be around on Wednesday, although the weather forecast wasn't good.
I felt slightly edgy this morning as I waited for the call. I feel vaguely uneasy even waiting for a delivery. It's that knowledge that your day is not entirely your own until whatever is supposed to happen has happened. More to the point, I am not good at spotting queens or stopping my own bees swarming, let alone deciphering what's happening in a colony I've never seen before so that I don't know how big it was this time last week and can't tell if it's suddenly got smaller. But it seemed incredibly churlish not to at least try to help, and rather two-faced to pose around being Treasurer of the local beekeeping association while refusing to help an actual beginner beekeeper with his actual bees.
The rain came on pretty early, and when he rang it was to say that he was hoping to look at them tomorrow morning. In the meantime at my suggestion he had spoken to the man who taught me beekeeping, to my great relief. The tutor's advice also seemed to boil down to a choice between doing a full artificial swarm and merely splitting the brood, which was all that I'd been able to think of. My neighbour is going to go to the tutor's regular practical apiary teaching session tomorrow evening, and in cowardly fashion I felt relieved that he was now under the wing of somebody more competent than I am.
In the meantime I agreed that if he wanted to call me tomorrow I would go round while he opened his bees, and try and work out what was happening. In the late morning, that is, because I have the early afternoon slot earmarked for my own inspection. I suppose that if my neighbour hasn't managed to lay his hands on a fully assembled beehive by tomorrow morning then I should offer to lend him my very battered and ancient national brood box. I switched to the commercial larger frames years ago, but the national box will still take the bigger frames with the aid of an eke stuck on top. I would need it back pretty soon, though, since at the current rate of progress it's going to be all I'll have left spare if I need to hive a swarm. Last year I was reduced to trying to house a beautiful large swarm in a nucleus box, and it turned out to be so large that they would not all fit in, poor things, and some had to spend the night hanging on the front of the hive.
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