Whew! A lot has happened in the past few days, but I have not had time to write about it.

On Sunday, I went back to my mom’s house and found a goodly-sized cluster of bees up where we had cut the bees out of the house: Either the queen was in there among them, or those bees were queenless and were just doing their best to survive with their doomed hive.

I made up a solution of sugar water and put it in a spray bottle, then sprayed the bees in the cluster many times, soaking them through: This helps distract them as they lick sugar off themselves, and it makes it harder for them to fly away. I then brushed as many as I could get into a pail a dumped them into the new hive I had set up.

I repeated this process about 8 times until the law of diminishing returns kicked in and I was only getting about 50 bees each round.

On Monday, Katie and I realized that the weather was about to get bad and the bees in the new hive needed to have food to eat, as we had not thought to leave them any of the old honeycomb, so we made some more sugar water feed and gave that to them. When I peeked into the hive to see how they were doing, they looked pretty pathetic: just a small cluster of them around the frames inside the hive box.

It doesn’t look that good for them, but if they can survive for a week or so and if our existing St. Ambrose hive can raise two frames of brood, we can take a frame of brood from Ambrose and put it in the new hive. The new hive can then raise a queen for themselves from the new brood.

My mom has swatted and vacuumed up about 100 bees over the past 4 days!