Cutouts and swarms

I recently got a call from a friend that he had some bees in the water meter outside his house.  So I went over there Saturday morning all suited up ready to do battle.  I puffed some smoke into the small opening in the water meter cover then carefully lifted the cover exposing the hive.  It turned out to be three small pieces of newly drawn comb and about 300 bees.  There was a queen present so I cut the come out and placed it into Langstroth frames in a medium size hive box.  I left the hive on the ground next to the water meter and returned after midnight to pick up the hive when I was sure all of the bees were inside.  The following day I wanted to transfer the bees to a nucleus hive box, add a coupe frames of nurse bees and brood from an existing hive and effectively have a new hive.  To gain more experience with handling queens, I scooped the queen from this feral hive into a small cylinder used for marking and clipping the queen.  I didn’t have any luck clipping the queens' wings but I did manage to rile her up with my manipulations.  I decided to just transfer her into a queen cage so she would be protected from the nurse bees from my other hives that I was going to combine her with.  I have never placed a queen in a cage before and I was taking much too long for her liking.  After about the third attempt she escaped and started flying around the bee yard.  She made a few passes beneath the nucleus hive I was setting up and then I lost track of her.  I waited to see if she would join her hive mates who were crowded in the corner of the nucleus hive but I never saw her return.  I then realized that she may have flown over to the other hives in the yard so I checked them out and sure enough there was the queen on the top of one of my other hives and with five bees on top of her stinging her to death.  Having lost the queen I just joined the remaining bees to an existing hive using the newspaper technique of isolating the bee box form the established hive with a sheet of newspaper that the bees will eventually chew through.

I had some redemption from my chance to increase my bee yard three days later when I went on a call to retrieve some feral bees from a flower pot.  When I arrived I was told the bees swarmed the day before.  Having driven quite a distance I was discouraged to think I had lost the opportunity to capture the bees until the homeowner pointed out a branch in their hedge where a nice ball of bees rested.  I quickly changed my focus from the flower pot, which still had some bees leaving and entering through the drain hole, and moved over to the hedge with a bucket and lid.  A few firm taps on the branch the bees rested on and I had about three pounds of bees in my bucket.

I transferred the flower pot to an outstretched sheet, pulled up the four corners like a diaper and tied the loose ends with rope to prevent the bees trapped in the flower pot and sheet from escaping.

So my feral hive rescue turned into a two-for-one.  I have begun feeding the two rescued hives to encourage them to stay put and make my apiary their new home.