Catching a swarm
I was jolted out of a lovely afternoon telephone conversation with my mother on the front porch when I looked toward my hives and saw several thousand bees swarming outside my hives! Bees will swarm en masse if they think their living conditions in the hive are too crowded. This means that about half of the bees in a colony and the queen will leave the hive, fly in a large mass, and land in a nearby tree temporarily. While the bulk of the bees start forming a “blob” of thousands of bees hanging on/off a branch, other bees from the hive start scouting a more permanent location. When you see a swarm in their temporary spot, you don’t have very long to intercept them; otherwise when the scouts return the entire mass follows them to who-knows-where!
It is true that our Hive #1 had a LOT of bees (though to be fair there was still space they had not yet filled, so I’m not quite sure how we were supposed to know a swarm was imminent.)
Steve and I found the swarm hovering over our goat field, and then they settled into a little apple tree that we left along the fence line close to the porch. Even though we really did not know what we were doing, we suited up, set up ladders, and found a lightweight box. for collection. Montana found a long-handled broom.
The trick is to cut, brush, or knock the mass of bees into a box, and then dump that box into a hive. The key is getting the queen out of those five thousand or so bees. If you get the queen in that process, chances are pretty good that when the scouts come back the rest of the colony will decide to stay where they are; if you do not get the queen in the shakedown, the whole colony goes where the scouts send them. This happened to me once at the other house - I cut the fir bough that had the swarm, but by dinner time all of the bees were gone (because I obviously did not get the queen.)
So now a day and a half later, the swarming bees are still happily living in their little 2-story bee hive condo under the tree where we retrieved them. They are on their second jar of sugar syrup and have 8 frames inside to fill up with honey and/or brood. I’m not entirely sure what I will do with this colony, since I only have equipment for a 3-hive set-up. But that is a project for tomorrow!
I honestly did not get very good pictures from the process - it was exhilerating and stressful and scary. These photos were taken as they were starting to form their temporary hive “cluster” - about 30 minutes later the size of the cluster was 4x and it was hanging down more (here it is kind of just covering the tree limb.) If it had stayed this way, we wouldn’t have been able to reasonably pull down the swarm. But once they were hanging lower they were easier to scrape/catch.
Steve went back up after the initial catch to try to grab a few more that were stubbornly remaining on the tree.
The IKEA box we used to collect, and the bees getting used to their new place. At this point we had no idea if we had gotten the queen or not - just had to wait it out overnight.
Bees busy inside their temporary bee condo under the tree from which they were retrieved, with the other hives in the background (they came from the one on the left.)
