Bye Honey?

These photos are from two different swarms. As we were getting ready to leave for the camping trip the bees swarmed again. Some families watch TV for fun, others ride bikes, we watch bees swarm. Sean and the children sat on the porch with the bees flying all around. I actually had all the children loaded in the van ready to go for over an hour while we finished catching the bees and re-hiving them. The first swarm landed in the tree of our backyard neighbor. We got a phone call from here while we were gone that the bees were swarming and could we please control our bees?!? Ummm, it's not like a dog you can tie up.

The second (or is 4th?) swarm that we caught landed in our next door neighbors tree in her front yard. Sean came home from work, he had a co worker with him that helped to catch the swarm this time. The co-worker was impressed by the swarm and had no bee keeping experience but was extremely calm. He had a layer of thick bees on his hand and asked, "Now what do I do? How do I get them off?!"

This was probably the biggest swarm yet. We moved a new hive to the side yard away from the other 3 hives. Then Sean got into the main hive that kept swarming and removed 13 swarm cells! No wonder they kept swarming. Usually when a new queen emerges the old queen takes off with part of the hive and a lot of honey and the new queen kills all the other swarm cells. It looks like we are going to buy 2 new queens and remove the queens that are not doing there job effectively.

Hopefully bee swarming is resolved and we did not lose all our honey for the second year in a row.

Unfortunately, I have no photos from the Scout camping trip but you can see some of there activities and pictures at Renee's blog and Syndi's blog.
They had a lot of fun hiking and playing. Aaron even had to get some first aid on a lump on his head after a very rough game of pine cone tag OUCH!

Ian, Ruby, Libby and I had a wonderful time at Grandma Chris' house. She fed us, we played on the slip and slide, ate some more and slept! We did end up with a fair number of bug bites but not as many as the boys and Taylor.

Erik got to go home with Grandma. When the children turn 7 they get a week at Grandma's house. Erik has been waiting his turn ever since Taylor got to go 4 years ago. He is looking forward to letters from home, swim lessons, finding the large lizard in Grandma's back yard, and visiting the enormous frog at Grandma's neighbors house.