When Colleen decided last spring that she wanted to buy some bees and equipment and start beekeeping, I thought it was an interesting idea, but not for me. She did all the work on the hives last year until it came time to extract the honey. Then I helped. The results were delicious - all fourteen pounds of it.
So this year, I decided to join in the fun and, aided by Colleen, I installed the second hive. I found it to be an eye-opening hobby.
It is amazing how docile they can be. You open up the hive to check them out (after smoking them with a smoker). You can then pick up the frames and turn them around and upside down and the bees keep working away as if nothing is happening. Of course, the bee suit and veil give you more confidence when working around bees.
It is also interesting to watch them during the day when they are so busy. It is like a madhouse. Bees are coming in from their foraging, and waiting in line to get inside to make their deposits, while others are going around in circles, ever higher, then flying off over the tops of trees to go out and gather more nectar, pollen, and water.
We were out most of the day today, and got back home early afternoon. After getting out of the car, we heard a loud buzzing sound. We tracked it down to a huge pine tree at the edge of the wooded area of our property out front. There was a huge swarm of bees just settling down on a branch.
At first, we were afraid that our bees had swarmed. We were trying to figure out how to get them off the branch, twenty-five feet up, and into an extra hive body we had. A swarm is what happens when a group of bees is led by a queen from their hive to start their own hive.
The book "First Lessons in Beekeeping" describes it thusly "Groups of workers begin a frenzied wave of running action around and around the interior of the nest. The old queen mother is bitten, jostled, and otherwise worried into a state of excitement. Then at once, about half the colony's population, along with the queen mother, takes wing and pours out of the colony's entrance, forming a cloud of bees easily filling a space equal to a suburban back yard."
They leave behind a new queen and the other part of the hive. So you can imagine why we were worried, we thought we had lost some bees.
We had read some information about capturing a swarm, as well as heard swarm-capturing stories in the beekeepers club we belong to. Our favorite story was from a man who used the shot-gun method once. He put a box under the branch, and used his shotgun to shoot down the branch so it fell in the box.
Our ladder was not long enough to get near the branch. So we called our daughter and son-in-law who live about 1/3 mile down the dirt road from us. We told them they could have the bees if they could help get them out of the tree. Our son-in-law always seems to have a tool for a job.
The first ladder he had was not long enough. So they went back to find another one.
While all of this was going on, I checked out our hives to see whether the swarm might be from our hives. It turns out our hives were well-populated and it did not seem they were ours. Later we compared pictures and the swarm bees looked like a different type than ours.
When they came back, our daughter and son-in-law brought a longer ladder, a hacksaw, and a pool net. Colleen set up the hive body directly under the swarm. I switched out one of the empty frames for a frame with uncapped honey from one of our hives. This was to give the swarm something that would be attractive them once we got them out of the tree.
Our son-in-law first tried the cardboard box method. He climbed up the ladder, held the cardboard box under the swarm and jostled them to try to get them into the box. Every step he took up the ladder shook the tree and the branch and the bees kept shifting around in the swarm making it look like a shape-shifting creature as the swarm took on different configurations.
The cardboard box method did not work well. A few hundred bees fell into the box and I dumped them into the hive body. But to get the bees to stay you have to get the queen into it.
He climbed back up the ladder with the hacksaw, and proceeded to saw off the limb. The limb fell on top of the hive body and some of the bees fell into the body as well. However, the queen bee flew back up to another limb in the tree, followed by a spiraling group of bees. It seemed
as if the air was full of bees.
Then he took the pool net, put it under the swarm, shook it, and dumped the bees from the net into the hive body. We all took turns doing that and we eventually got the queen into the hive body. The rest of the bees followed her. It was interesting seeing so many bees (might have been several thousand bees) doing that. Colleen and her daughter were scooping up handfuls of bees and dropping them into the hive body (of course we were all in bee suits with veils and gloves).
The bees quickly calmed down and began their job of settling into their new hive.
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly.
Old beekeeper's saying.
