Third one in a row

I know this is getting a bit repetitive but.. I collected another swarm yesterday. That's three in a week, and they've all been large prime swarms. This was near the out apiary and based on the location I initially thought they were from one of my hives but after going through them and finding I wasn't missing any bees I figure they were probably attracted by the scent from the hives.

Yet another Prime Swarm

Unlike every other swarm collection I've done this one went pretty much by the book. I held an open nuc below the bees a sharp shake dropped most of them into the box then I added some frames and left them to get in by themselves.

In they go

I was a bit short on frames so although it's a five frame nuc I was only able to put four frames into it. I've put a follower board in the gap and I'll just have to hope the new frames and foundation I've got on order arrive fairly soon and I'll probably move these into a full size hive asap.

Later this evening after writing the first half of this entry I popped to the bee yard to install a vent in the shed (gets hot in there, don't want wax to melt) and noticed a cluster of bees on the front on the nuc. Sometimes bees will hang out of the front of the hive if it's a hot day but that wasn't what these were doing and it half nine at night they ought to have been inside. It looked to me like there was too many bees to fit in the hive.

Overflowing

Lifting up the hive roof I found the airspace was packed with bees. They needed moving into a bigger hive straight away. Last week I'd ordered some frames, foundation and roofs but they hadn't arrived. Going on the FedEx website and checking the tracing number I was surprised to see FedEx thought they'ed left me a delivery card 4 days ago, I'll have to pop to the depot tomorrow for them to sort it out.. I could certainly do without that but in the meantime I needed to move the bees this evening. I had a ten frame super with new frames and foundation and a shallow brood frame for drone culling and a few crownboards so I popped to grab a couple of solid floors, a queen excluder and some gaff tape went back to the bees. I moved all four frames and the follower board into the new brood box and added the shallow frame.

There's just too many of you

With all the frames, follower board and adhering bees removed there were still a lot of bees left in the nuc sides -and there were still bees in the roof and on the hive front too. The frames and follower board left the new brood box half empty so I shook out the remaining bees into the gap and put the queen excluder over the brood box and the ten frame super above that. I'm hoping they'll head up to the super rather than drawing wild comb in the void but if everything goes to plan I'll be filling that gap with new frames tomorrow anyway. Bees were nosanoving at the entrance as I put the crownboard on. Unfortunately I didn't have a spare hive roof yet (thanks FedEx..) so I had to improvise a little. I taped the crown board onto the super so water doesn't get in normally the roof sides would take care of that, then put another floor and crownboard on top of that. Gathering a few bricks to keep it in place I found a double glazed pane of textured I'd found on a building site near Aylesburry a while ago. I have a vague plan to use it for some sort of cold frame type thing eventually. I stuck that on top of the crownboard and floor then put some bricks on top to stop it blowing off. It should keep things a little drier till I can put a proper roof on tomorrow.

Looks daft.
Should be adequate for one night though.