So I did get the queen with that first shake. I should’ve then left them there till dusk, so that the scout bees would all have returned from viewing prospective homes before I picked up the skep and took the bees to an empty hive. But the memory of the prime swarm leaving the damson tree so soon was still sharp. I didn’t want to risk losing yet another swarm. So I grabbed the skep then and there and took the swarm back to the apiary, where I rehomed it in a nucleus box. This evening, there are scout bees circling the elder branch around the place where the swarm used to be. I feel rather bad about it. I wonder whether they will be able to remember their old home and return to it, or whether their memories have been irreversibly reset. The fact that they are still out there seems to indicate the latter, or at least that their “reprogramming” is quite robust. Hopefully, though, they will eventually give up the swarm for lost and will follow the trail of Nasonov pheromone to one of the apiary hives.
Bees from the swarm began fanning as soon as they were in the nucleus box. One bee very helpfully stationed herself as a Nasonov beacon at the hive entrance, tail in the air, wings beating to fan the pheromone.
I noticed that the bees in the original hive were doing the same thing, arrayed all across the landing board. Too much time seemed to have passed for this to still be related to their earlier swarming, so I hovered to watch for a while, calculating that it was possibly about time that a new queen in that hive would be starting to go on mating flights, and that this might be the bees signalling the way back home for her. So I watched the landing board in case I was lucky enough to see a queen’s return.
And I did see something! Not on the landing board, but climbing on a plant in front of it, there was a queen bee.
Could this be the new young queen, gone out for her first flight, and now trying to get home? I picked her up.
