I didn't have a full hive. The night before I built a bottom board and I made a makeshift inner cover and top cover, then went to bed. I got the swarm the next morning, put them in the apiary and was then off to my local beek store (about 40min from me) and purchased a proper inner cover and top cover (the others were fine, just wouldn't have lasted). Anyway, when telling my story there they said I shouldn't do anything with the hive (except for feeding) for 2 weeks. He said don't even look at it as they may not like your eyes and decide to leave... exaggerating of course, but he was very adamate about not doing anything with it for 2 weeks. His reasoning was that although they are there now, it doesn't mean they have adopted that hive as their new home. They may just hang out for a little bit until newly dispatched scouts come back w/a report of a better place to live. He said give them no reason to not love their new hive.
Now, I captured the swarm around 8am and the swarm was about 8 miles away from my apiary, so already dispatched scouts are never going to come back but will they send out other scouts? How hard is it to actually keep a feral swarm? Also, I am fine w/leaving them alone for 2 weeks if that is what should be done but I'm a bit anxious about it because one of my hives really, really surprised me. I had recent put on a second deep for brood on it (was a 2# package installed on Apr 20th) and the next week they drew out 3 frames. 4 days later, I was out doing work on another hive and decide to just lift the cover on that hive and see how they were progressing, and they had 8 frames drawn!
So, I have heard that swarms are comb producing machines. I gave them 1 deep to live in, that's it. I'm concerned about what the hive may look like in 2 weeks, i.e. filled? When I put on the new inner cover, I counted the frames and they are filling 4 1/2 deep frames pretty densely packed, i.e. many on top of each other.
What would you do?
Jeremy