The Sunday Swarm

Look Closely. This is what a swarm of bees looks like.

A lot has happened in the past week. We installed hives on Monday (bringing us to seven hives). On Tuesday, a colony of bees that we bought just disappeared (taking us down to six hives). On Thursday, Dad drove back to Santa Clara and bought TWO hives packages of bees to replace the ONE that flew off (bringing us to eight). (No pictures of the installation that day.) On Friday and Saturday it snowed about 4 inches. On Sunday we were looking up in the trees above our hive and spotted... no it couldn't be. We spotted... a swarm of bees.

(If we could catch it, we'd have nine hives.)

We're pretty sure it wasn't the bees from one of our hives as we had done several inspections recently and didn't see any swarm cells. It seemed too big a swarm to be the colony that disappeared on Tuesday-- plus the nights last week were very cold (27° On Saturday night) too cold for any colony to survive a week in a tree. It must have come from a neighbor's colony. That's all we can figure out. Maybe it was our missing colony... but I don't think so.

Anyway, we captured the swarm. It was 2o feet high up in a tree. Neither Dad, nor I had had any experience with capturing a swarm before. We didn't have all of the right equipment... but we made do and we think we got it in a little nuc box-- which is a little hive box that is usually used to rear queen bees.

Here are the photos from the event. My mom took them all-- and wasn't wearing a veil or gloves. She stayed back a bit but she was pretty brave. Dad and I each got stung once on the hand in this process, and were pretty lucky since we had more than a few bees get INTO our bee suits. Among the bees in our suits, Dad had one crawl into his ear and I had one walk across my face. The fact that we are still alive is testament to the calm nature of swarming bees in general, and this colony in particular.

Hopefully we didn't inadvertently smoosh the queen in this attempt to gather them.

After cutting branches to get them out of the way, we climbed 20 feet up a ladder, that was sitting in the bed of Dad's truck, and tried to shake the swarm into a box. That was the theory anyway. We hoped to get the bulk of them with as few shakes as possible. We got about 75% of them. We hoped the queen was among the clump we got.

Duct tape is a wonderful thing. 30,000 bees need to be contained.

I had a bee INSIDE my suit so I removed it and put a mosquito net over my face.

There were bees everywhere. We thought we had our suits zipped up tight... somehow we had them crawling around inside both of our suits. Luckily the bees were very kind.

We tried a trick that we saw on Youtube... where you set the bees out in front of a hive and they just walk right in. Too easy. It didn't work.

We ended-up opening the hive box and dumping the bees in. It worked.

Hopefully we caught the queen. We'll know by tomorrow.

Update: We think we captured the queen. We placed the nuc on top of a regular hive body... with what Johnny Cash referred to as an "A-dapter kit."