# oh great, a swarm on August 27



## johnsof (Oct 14, 2014)

So I caught it in a couple of nuc boxes, now what? Wait a few days and try a newspaper combine, I guess...


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## Mr.Beeman (May 19, 2012)

I caught one just a couple of days ago also. I had to use my bee vac and placed drawn supers above the vac. The next day they moved into the hive next door to them. My guess is that they were queenless from the get go. It was a good sized swarm... probably 5lbs or so.


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## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

>Wait a few days and try a newspaper combine

It's got a queen, you can't combine two queen right hives, you might end up with two dead queens. you will need to remove one of the queen first.

Did the swarm come from one of your hives? If so then you need to take care of that hive, may need that queen if this hive fail to produce a mated one. You might want to inspect and see if they are planning more after swarms...


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## johnsof (Oct 14, 2014)

[/QUOTE]It's got a queen, you can't combine two queen right hives, you might end up with two dead queens. you will need to remove one of the queen first.

Did the swarm come from one of your hives? If so then you need to take care of that hive, may need that queen if this hive fail to produce a mated one. You might want to inspect and see if they are planning more after swarms...[/QUOTE]

Oh, for sure. Up here it's getting late enough that I really wonder if a virgin queen can find enough - or any - drones to get mated. If I look in some of my own hives there are drones, not tons of them but they're there, but out away from my hives, I really wonder. Not all of my hives still have drone brood, as an example. That's why I figure to do a combine. I suppose I could keep the nuc as-is and feed heavily and stick some frames of brood and honey in there and try to overwinter it but I'd rather not. I just wonder how long I should really wait before I combine.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

johnsof, has your hive that swarmed had continuous syrup available to it for the past few weeks? seems weird that they would swarm this late. if you can wait a few weeks to allow the new queen to prove herself or not it will make it easier to figure out how to do your combining safely, perhaps going with the queen that has the best brood pattern, or if both are looking good equalize the two hives and put sugar on top for insurance.


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## jwcarlson (Feb 14, 2014)

I've got some ding dong hives that have swarmed the last couple weeks as well. Frustrating. Not acceptable up this far, let alone Wisconsin.


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## Harley Craig (Sep 18, 2012)

put them in a 5 over 5 nuc and feed the crap out of them, might as well use them to draw comb for you while they are in the mood. you can determine what you want to do with them in a few weeks time


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## D.A.S. (Jun 17, 2011)

My question is, can any old timers tell us what these late swarms in south eastern Nc mean, dose it mean a mild winter, dose it signal a fall flow, what are the bees telling us?


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