Feeding my bees

A few days ago I received a call from my contact at Garden Cities about a swarm of bees inside an irrigation box in a townhouse development in Sunningdale. The gardeners were getting stung and they could not get to the valves that operate the sprinklers.

I went to collect the swarm plus the honeycomb that was rich in pollen but not much honey.

I placed the swarm in a beehive alongside my house, but they kept crawling out of the hive and gathered inside the cardboard box that I had brought them in.

I removed the box, but by morning they dissapeared completely. I thought they had absconded, but then I noticed that an other hive (about 5 meters away), suddenly seemed to have a MUCH larger colony of bees.  It seems this new (smallish) swarm had merged with an established and thriving colony. This seemed strange, especially as there was no fighting among the two swarms, they seemed to completely integrate without any stress.

I watched them for some time, the new merged colony was working very well, but when I opened the hive to inspect, I found almost no brood (larvae), not much honey, but a seemingly surplus of pollen. 

I tried to see if there were two queens (as I know I had caught the queen with the new swarm), but could not find even one queen. In the absense of a queen, the other females (the workers) of the Cape Honeybee sometimes lay eggs, but they tend to lay multiple eggs in one cell, which I could find no evidence of, so I guess there is a queen somewhere but  I had just not spotted her.

The bees seem surprisingly tame, showing no agression at all, and having no guard bees at the hive entrance. I could remove the frames and inspect them without gloves. The bees seemed to be feeding off my sweat from being in the hot sun. I do not know if they are after the moisture or the salt or what, but I wet the grass around the hive with a hosepipe and immediately many bees started drinking water from that. Some were crawling into the hose to find more water.

Later today I went to water the dogs, but the tap handle was covered with bees so I went to fetch water from indoors instead. There was a small water leak on the tap which probably attracted the bees.

This evening I decided to try to bolster the colony by feeding them. I made a mixture of old honey, brown sugar, corn flour, peanut butter and soya. The bees could not wait to get to this. While I was shaping them into patties, the bees were crawling all over to start feeding even before I could place them at the hive.

The last patty I added some extra water, just as an experiment. This picture above is this "wet" one which made more of a puddle than a patty.

I'll keep feeding them until the swarm grows to a reasonably strong size, then I shall move the hive to a rural area (before my neighbours start getting stung).

Still battling to find a good spot to keep my hives though, as all my hives in the Morningstar Bluegum Forest were stolen (despite extensive security measures), and my hives in Joostenbergvlaktes seem to be poisoned as all the colonies have absconded, leaving me with a mess of waxmoth and their larvae in all those hives, with no salvagable wax and absolutely no honey!