I thought I'd try to find out how often this occurs, because it's about to wear us out. My wife and I purchased 3 nucs last year, left them all their honey, and tried to take very good care of them.
Now within the last 10 days, the weather hear has bounced around from the 80s to the 30s and we've had 3 swarms. They have all landed on the same peach tree branch about 20' from the hives and about 2' off the ground. We've managed to catch all of them with the last occurring today (4/7/11) which was quite a bit larger than the last two.
So my question is: is this common or did we just get "lucky"? We've been inspecting the hives and removed a bit of brace comb that was spanning the two hive bodies in all 3 original hives. These were largely filled with near-hatching drones. We looked for queen cells, but never found any, so they may have been on the very bottom hive body. I'm starting to think our peach tree is just producing bees instead of peaches...
The old and new hives seem to be doing well so far, though I'm not 100% sure both have queens. We did see the queen on the second hive crawling on the bottom of the inner cover just before we put the lid on the day we captured the swarm. Is it common for queenless swarms to return to their original hives? Or should I try to find her?
Thanks for any help or suggestions! Our main nectar flow hasn't even started yet, but if I come home to another blob of bees I'm just going to start selling bees instead. :P
Mod update: Adding link om request: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ziflin/5599684992/#in/set-72157623442988730