Barn swarm capture
The basswood started blooming Monday,
and Tuesday afternoon I walked over to see how much bee activity
there was around that prime nectar source. "Wow, that's a
lot more bees than I recall from previous years!" I thought to
myself as the roar of bees washed over me. But then the bees
literally passed over me and headed en masse toward the
barn! Yes, we were finally being the recipient (rather than
the donor) of a swarm!
If I'd known, I
should have seen the signs that something was brewing
Monday. I noticed a worker bee poking around in the extra
Warre quilt (small bee box) sitting on the porch beneath a
slightly offset lid. More telling was the group of a hundred
or so bees that were buzzing around the peak of the barn Monday
afternoon. But I'd seen that kind of bee activity around the
barn last year, with no result, so figured maybe I was seeing some
kind of native bee that was just now coming out of
hibernation. Wrong! What I observed on Monday was,
first, a scout bee checking for possible hive cavities and,
second, scout bees gaining critical mass as they chose a new hive
location. (I'm assuming that last year, our barn was a
runnerup location, thus the lack of further activity. This
year, we won!)
Anyway, back to Tuesday afternoon when the
cloud of bees came from the southwest, flew low over the trailer,
then ended up at their destination in front of the aeration holes
just under the peak of the barn roof. Soon, I could tell
that the bees were working their way through the labyrinth of
rafters and over to the six-foot-high stack of Langstroth
equipment that has been sitting vacant in the barn ever since our
last hives died two years ago and we moved over to Warre
equipment. A gap between two carelessly-stacked boxes was
large enough for the bees to move in, and within a couple of hours
(spurred on by a short storm), the colony was entrenched in its
new home.
(As a side note, the
bees completely ignored the top
bar swarm trap
just behind the barn, but I don't have any data about whether they
would have liked a real swarm attractant better than the used
Langstroth equipment. After installing our package, I got sidetracked and
never put the roof on our Warre-hive
attractant, so
it's not yet in play.)
A breathless call to
my beekeeping mentor later, I realized that I needed to see what
the insides of those Langstroth boxes looked like if I was going
to let the bees stay in them and just move the relevant boxes out
into the yard as a new hive. My neglect had resulted in most
of the wax in my old Langstroth boxes getting eaten up by wax
moths, but I was able to cobble together a brood box full of
partially- or fully-drawn comb with little moth damage. I
started to assemble some good supers too, but it turned out the
reason the bees had selected the boxes they had was because the
two supers they were moving into had the best comb in the
barn. There were three frames missing from one of the
supers, though, so I'm glad I went through and filled that gap in
before the bees could built wonky comb in the empty space.
I was a little afraid
to mess around with the bees while they were settling in because I
was afraid they might decide to hit the road, but they put up with
my intrusion gamely and just kept streaming into the hive to join
their queen. The swarm had showed up in the garden around
3:30 pm, I did my hive manipulation around 4 to 4:30, and by 6:00,
nearly ever bee was inside the hive. Swarm capture
success! (Granted, I didn't have to move the swarm to a new
box, so there wasn't much that could have gone wrong. Still,
I'll take my successes where I find them.)
More on how we moved the hive to its permanent location in a later
post. But, for now, I just want to end by mentioning that
I'm 99% sure these bees didn't come from my hives, and instead
sprang from the same location where the swarm I lost earlier ended
up. I wonder if there's a beekeeper somewhere to the
southwest who gained a swarm a few weeks ago and lost one yesterday?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Mom is dying to know if you wore your suit. What I want to know is was this possibly the same hive that left you a couple weeks ago??? This is a great post! Grand to be a part of your excitement.
-sis
Maggie --- I definitely wore my suit and even my bee gloves. Bees are very gentle in a swarm, but my hair seems to be a bee trap when they're in the air, and I can't help getting freaked out when a bee is stuck somewhere I can't see it, millimeters from my skull. To prevent the freakout, I suited up.
This is almost definitely not the same swarm from a few weeks ago. Unless they really hated the location they moved into, a swarm doesn't pick up and leave again. They might swarm again after building up and filling the space, but that's unlikely to happen the same year.
Anna I caught a swarm back around May 16th and had no problem moving it from a low hanging fruit tree to a NUC box. Enjoy your swarm!
The old saying goes for beeks: A swarm in May - is worth a load of hay. A swarm in June - is worth a silver spoon. A swarm in July - isn't worth a fly.
The old English saying goes: “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!”