Our First Swarm Collection!!

I will readily admit the thought of collecting a swarm of bees from the wild was a little intimidating to me at first. We had watched video after video of others doing it and many of them seemed simple and easy to do, however there were some that scared the daylights out of me LOL. 

My husband’s Aunt called us the other day to tell us her cousin had a swarm that landed in a bush in the front yard and thought we might be interested in going to get it. We were. We grabbed our suits, our smoker, and our swarm trap box, frames, and honey frame and away we went. We were very excited. Our first swarm! We were also nervous…. what if we couldn’t do it?? 

When we arrived, we met the nice people who lived there, and they showed us this neat, snug little ball of bees about 3 feet off the ground in the bush. It was probably the size of a 3lb package. We felt capable hahaha. If you had to pick a swarm to do for your first time, this was a perfect one to build your confidence with. Hubby, who of course is braver than I am, walked over and opened the branches and looked in closer at the swarm. They never moved, they were very content. 

Suddenly I didn’t feel so worried about being able to do this. I lit the smoker, and put on a bee jacket and some latex gloves. We carried the swarm box over to the bush and placed it under the swarm. My husband didn’t even put a suit on. He held the box, and I shook the swarm into it with about 4 good shakes. Then we put the cover on the box leaving about a 2 inch opening for the strays to be able to get in. Sure enough, as soon as we walked away from it, they noticed the queen was inside and like magic, they all started to go towards the opening and eventually the majority of the bees entered the box all on their own. We really didn’t have to do much at all. We stood and chatted with the couple who lived there and her sister and husband, telling them a little about how fascinating bees are and why they swarm and just passed the time waiting for the strays to finish finding the queen. We closed the cover, put a strap on the box, and loaded it into the truck. We thanked the lady for letting us collect them, and headed home. 

We were delighted to have a new hive of bees, and laughed at ourselves over how easy it was and how we thought we might not be able to do it. Our confidence is now pretty high on being able to collect a swarm, well at least a simple straight forward one like this was. We do have a fellow who has asked if we would collect a swarm from 20 ft. up in an old tree, we are still processing that idea, LOL. 

The outcome of the story is that we arrived home, had a nice 5 frame nuc hive all set up for the swarm and gently transferred the bees from the swarm box to the hive. We were able to find the pretty queen and carefully placed her in the hive. It has been 3 days since we placed them in their new hive, and so far, from outside observation, everything is looking great. Now we have found a new BEEK activity to get hooked on. Everything new we try, we love. Beekeeping is definitely a great hobby, ever changing, always learning, challenging, a great source of head scratching, oh no moments, Woo Hoo moments, successes, and mistakes. It is full of anticipation, excitement, fulfillment, disappointment, amazement, and wonder. It gives you a lot to learn, a lot to do, a lot to try, and it is always exciting. Needless to say, next spring, we will be going swarm hunting for sure 🙂 

Keep on Keep’n Beezy <3