Only after talking to the neighbors did I realize they had all once been in flight, very similar to swarm behavior. As to why they landed back on the hive body, I have no idea. So we went outside and did our monday check. The yellow hive had very little comb started, plenty of food, and the queen was free. We took the 2nd hive body off and took out the bee arrival box and the can of syrup (so we could get the lid on without using the second hive body. They were HOT, very upset about having the swarm process interrupted. Anyway we put a ziplock with sugar syrup and a second patty just incase they were hungry, closed up shop and went on to the green hive.
When we opened the lid of the green hive we found this:
But instead of the comb being built in the frames.... it was on the lid! Seriously! Queen, brood, nectar, pollen and the whole lot on the lid. Fuck... can we get a normal hive? Nope.
So we took out the bee arrival box and the sugar syrup can, and gently cut away the comb. I couldn't close the lid with it on there. We got the queen and her attendants into the hive body, replaced the missing frames then added another patty and a sugar syrup ziplock. Then we closed up shop. The green hive, Italians, were much nicer to work with.
All this happened Monday evening.
Tuesday afternoon I went out to check the girls. The yellow hive was gone. They didn't like us and proceeded to finish the swarm process and take off. It's really depressing to loose a hive that just started 3 days earlier. But the green hive seems to be doing really well, active foragers and very calm. So we will have one hive for the time being. If this one starts the swarm process later in the year we will attempt a split. We might attempt it anyway and just introduce a new Kona queen to help with getting genetic diversity back into our bees. It's all up in the air still, but we have many options.
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