A friend has a Japanese honey bee colony living inside a cavity in the structure of his mountain home in Mie Prefecture. That is southwest of Tokyo, if I am not mistaken, and a 9 hour drive from here. I may go on a trip there to see if I can remove the colony and bring them back to Fukuoka some time.
I have a visit planned to see the 3 hives of Japanese honey bees that are located on the roof of a 12-story building near the Maedashi Kyudai Byoin Mae subway station on Saturday, June 11. Dr. Tadauchi will meet me at the Hakozaki campus and we will drive there in his car. I am looking forward to that. Those are the hives that belong to Mr. Hotaka Tomita who came here last week to see my hive.
Yesterday I decided to try and harvest some honey from my hive on the roof of the Agriculture Building #1. I did not smoke them, but started tapping on the top outside of the hive to drive them down, and that resulted in a bunch of angry bees flying out and bumping on my veil and my clothing, so I decided not to do it yesterday since they seemed very riled up. Today I thought I would do the same, except to smoke them first, but when I got up there after lunch, there was much erratic flight swirling around the front of the hive out to some distance, as though they are about to swarm, so I again decided that it would probably not be good to try and harvest honey at this time either.
Later in the afternoon I went up to look at them again (between periods of preparing my Biology Class lecture for this Friday) and the flight activity was more normal looking with in and out activity of males and working foragers with a number of guard bees outside the entrance as well. I stayed for a little while observing the activity when I saw something I had never seen before. I saw a queen in flight, returning to the hive. That got me to thinking about the possible meaning of what I had observed. It was probably either a new queen or the old queen (I say “probably” because there could be other possibilities). My first guess is that it was the old queen getting ready to swarm and leave the hive. Another possibility is that it was a new queen just returning from a mating flight and there is currently more than one queen in the hive. It is difficult to tell. Anyway, I am expecting a swarm to emerge from the hive soon because of the activity I observed today. Another observation is that during the past couple of weeks I have seen a lot of drone cappings on the cement below the hive, indicating the emergence of many new drones. I suspect that this is also an indication of an impending swarm. Today was quite a warm day, warmer than usual, so that also suggests to me that there will soon be another swarm issuing from my hive. I will be watching for it. Hopefully I will not lose this one like I did the last one.