I was sitting in my office, glanced out the window, and saw a small tornado of bees gathering in an oak tree in the front yard.
Unfortunately, we had no more spare beehive parts. We had to borrow a super from our daughter and son-in-law. I emailed a couple of the members of our beekeeping club, and one of them had a top and bottom board I could borrow for the super.
This one was more complicated, as the bees had swarmed around a limb too high for us to reach, even with our ladder. This necessitated me climbing the ladder, climbing up on a lower limb, and using the electric alligator loppers to detach two limbs from the tree - the first limb I cut down was between the limb the trees were on and the ground.
Trying to saw off the limb the bees were on, I managed to get the alligator loppers stuck. After much twisting, pushing, pulling, and shoving, I finally freed the loppers. However, the limb was not completely severed.
Back down on the ground, we tried using a rope to pull the limb from the trunk of the tree - to no avail. We then tried twisting the branch for a while - again, no luck. Finally, I climbed back up the ladder with the loppers, and cut further from the trunk and the limb finally fell on top of the super.
We gently grabbed handfuls of bees off the limb and dropped them into the super. We finally got the queen into the super and the rest of the bees followed her in.
Early that same evening, we rearranged the two existing hives so we had a hive body on which to place the super. We then placed the top and bottom boards on the super, and carried it to our "apiary".
Knowing that the bees needed some quick energy so they could begin drawing out comb on the frames inside the hive body and super, we made some sugar water, placed it in the quart jar and placed it in the feeder.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Over the next few days, the bees from the "new" hive and the old hive next to it became very agitated. It finally became apparent that the old bees were flying from their hive to the new hive and robbing the feeder of sugar water. We did not see the bees actually fighting the first couple of days, but we stopped filling the feeder with the sugar water. Yesterday, I took a look, and saw two bees from the new hive dragging one of the old bees down the side of the hive, making all kinds of racket as they duked it out.
When we get the new pieces we ordered, we will take a closer look and see what is left. Buzzing can be heard from all three hives, so it may turn out okay in spite of our mistake.
