Summer Swarm

 The bees did it to us again!

This time it was the Ponyo colony that swarmed (Alden named it after the movie he loves so much). Sometime about two weeks ago Queen Ponyo decided to take half the colony and swarm. We noticed a decline in productivity (bees flying in and out) but were busy doing other things so we didn't check it out. Needless to say we were unable to retrieve the swarm like we did earlier this year with Queen Sally.

Today we opened up the hive and saw some queen cells that were empty... so a new queen hatched and is now (hopefully) running the colony. We could not find the queen so we will have to check back in a few weeks and see if there are babies. If so, this is merely an unfortunate population dip that will hopefully not effect the colony preparing for winter. If there are no babies then there is no queen and the colony is doomed... Maybe we could merge the remaining workers  with another colony, but that is about it. It is too late in the season to re-queen.