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   When I became allergic to bee stings, I was told by my wife and the doctors in the emergency room that I must get rid of my bees. The thought of doing so has been really hard. I enjoy working with them, but that has become too dangerous to continue. My original plan was to take them to my son, Walter, in new home in Texas. Between his work, building a new home, and the logistics of getting them there, that plan was scrapped. I have since been trying to sell them locally.  

   Late fall last year, my bee mentor, Wayne, did a hive check and treated for mites. Since that time, the only thing I have done with them is to drive by in the pickup and watch them fly in and out of the hives. This can be a good strategy during the winter when the bees would rather be left alone, but during the spring and summer, things can go wrong in a hurry if a person is not checking on them. 

   About three weeks ago when it was extremely hot, on one of my passing trips, I noticed very large numbers of bees hanging on the outside of the hives. This is the normal way for bees to cool off, but what was not normal was the large numbers of bees. It looked like too many bees to fit inside. Bees are particularly about the amount of space they have. Too many bees in the space provided will cause them to swarm. This is when half or more of the group packs up and leaves in search of a new, more spacious home. If there is too much room in a hive, the guard bees can not defend against invaders such as hive beetles and wax moths. Knowing I probably had too many bees for the space they needed, I immediately put supers on all three hives. A super is a hive box with empty frames providing space and a place to build comb and store honey. 

   I made plans yesterday with my other son, Damon, to just come over, pull the lids, and make sure the bees still had plenty of room. The first two hives were slammed full of new comb and completely filled with honey. They were officially out of room again. In order to prevent swarming, we decided to pull the supers, extract the honey, and put the empty supers back on.

   The third hive was a whole different situation. The super had very little honey and both the super and the top hive body had wax moths eating the honeycomb. As one can imagine, honey with no honeycomb makes quite a mess. My guess as to what happened is this group of bees was ready to swarm at the time I put on the super. Not noticing they had a bunch of new space, the majority of the hive’s bees left. There were not enough bees left to defend the colony, and the wax moths gained a foothold. I am not sure that hive can be saved. If the old queen left with the swarm, there should be a new queen being raised by the remaining bees. The colony needs a little time for her to grow up, get mated, and start laying eggs to build up the numbers. A queen will lay about fourteen hundred eggs per day so it does not take to long to get the numbers up if the hive can stay healthy until then. 

   What started off as a ten- or fifteen-minute project ended up being an all-day affair as we re-arranged hives and extracted honey. We did though finish with about five gallons of honey that and two really strong hives (which are still for sale). I am not sure about the other one and not sure if Damon will volunteer to help be check hives again.

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