"Our hive cast a swarm!!  The first one ever!!  What do I do?"

Perhaps it was the excess of exclamation points, but something told our movie-star neighbor he should skip the advice and just come over to lead the capture.

Our neighbor later told us that this was the toughest swarm he'd ever captured because of the masses of honeysuckle encircling the bees.  Mark had suggested we cut away the vines, but I was terrified this swarm would be annoyed by the activity and leave just like last year's package did.  Luckily, our neighbor had a simple solution --- spray the swarm liberally with sugar water so they'd stay put, then clip those vines.

He also suggested we smear peach leaves along the inside of the boxes we were going to install the honeybees into.  Since our neighbor had just bought some lemongrass oil on my recommendation, we also dabbed a few drops of that fragrant substance on the inner walls of the hive as well.

"Are we going to scoop the bees into a bucket?" I asked.  (Imagine this sentence uttered with the intonation of the classic "Are we there yet?")  We'd very carefully cut all of the vines underneath the swarm, but left one in the middle to make the mass of bees easy to shake.  But into what?

My neighbor didn't like the bucket idea, and planned to instead levitate a hive body under the swarm and knock the bees directly into their new home.  Here's where Mark's ingenuity shone.  "Why don't we put a couple of brackets on the tree, add a board on top, and then put the hive there?"

Nearly as easily done as said!  Too bad our hive was a cobbled-together version of Langstroth and Warre equipment since we want the bees to eventually live in the latter but have much more of the former on hand.  It seemed to form a relatively solid container, though.

Unfortunately, the tree grew at a bit of a slant, so there was a good chance the bees would fall into the gap between the hive and the trunk.  Perhaps a bee book would make a good ramp to guide them in the right direction?

Here's where activity got heated and we stopped taking pictures (except the last one below).  Our neighbor and I suited up, I stood on a bucket with a brush, and he stood on the ground with a hoe.

"On three, I'll yank this vine and shake the bees into the hive, then you start brushing any stragglers down," he ordered.  "One, two, THREE!"

Whoosh!  Bees were everywhere!  Even though bees in a swarm are supposed to be very polite, I was ultra-glad I'd donned a bee suit since I'm positive I'd otherwise have ended up with several ladies stuck in my hair.  I put on the lid, then we stepped back and waited.

At first, we thought we'd been successful, but when I checked on the hive just before dark, the swarm had reformed in the narrow gap between tree and box.  I guess our bee book wasn't as good of a ramp as I'd thought and the queen fell into the gap, then everyone else followed.  Downhearted, I figured the experiment had been a failure, but by the next morning, I'd figured out a solution.

Mark and I headed out to the swarm first thing the next day and I sprayed all the bees I could reach with sugar water.  Then Mark gently eased the second box away from the tree, figuring at least some of the bees would adhere to the surface and end up dangling above the cavity below.  Sure enough, his gentle motion combined with my brushing got at least half of the swarm into the lower box, then we pushed the hive back together.

This time, I was sure we'd failed since bees nearly immediately began clustering between the box and the tree again.  But a few hours later, the bees were streaming into the hive box instead.  I can only guess that, at first, that gap smelled like queen, but as her scent dissipated, the workers discovered the queen herself, ensconced in her new hive.

Unfortunately, this happy sight was not the ending of the story.  On our neighbor's recommendation, we left the hive in place that afternoon so any stragglers would join their queen, and I went off-farm to monitor the quality of our nearby river.  It was a blazingly hot day, reaching nearly 90 in the shade, and perhaps the heat was too much for the bees (or they really wanted to live in that site two miles away).  Because when I came home, the hive was empty, the swarm gone.

So, we didn't catch our first swarm after all, but I did get a lot of hands-on experience and I feel much more confident that I'll know what to do next time.  I'll probably move the hive to a good location right away if we catch another swarm, and I should definitely get our ducks in a row so we always have extra equipment on hand for swarm catching. 

Of course, catching swarms is always chancy, so we'll continue to experiment with setting up swarm traps, the sooner the better.  Honeybee Democracy explains that the scouts who go out looking for a new homesite are usually the hive's oldest foragers, which suggests they may be househunting on the sly for weeks before they leave their old home (meaning that a swarm trap set up the day before a swarm emerges may be too late).  And even though I haven't read any data to this effect, I also wouldn't be surprised if honeybees preferentially choose new house sites further from their home colony, since they'd then have less competition for resources and less chance of catching pests and diseases.  Perhaps bees would be most likely to move into a swarm trap at the parking area, a third of a mile from our other hive?

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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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