a swarm

I had the opportunity yesterday evening to learn and experience something new about bees. My friend Kathy was getting a hive from one of her friends, who also had a swarm. So yesterday evening, we went to get the hive and collect the swarm.

Personally, I had never seen a swarm before. It is a big "clump" of bees that leave a hive for one reason or the other (a lot of the time because the hive is over-crowded). A large group of bees, including the queen, leaves and finds a provisory location on a tree limb, or some other place.

Apparently, swarms are easy to catch (that is, if they don't choose the top of a 30-foot tree)because the bees, knowing that they would not have a "home" for a while, gorge themselves on honey before leaving, so they are pretty docile.

We put the hive box, minus most of the frames, under the branch where the swarm was hanging (fortunately it was a low branch, easy to reach), and we sprayed the bees with sugar syrup to make them even more quiet.

After a little while, Kathy just shook the swarm into the hive! Most of the bees fell in.

We waited a little while for stragglers to join the others then Kathy brushed the bees gathered at the entrance of the hive into a box and dropped them in the hive.

Then we closed the entrance of the hives, tied them down, loaded them into the back of the truck, and off we went to Kathy's yard, the bees' new home. Almost looks like Christmas, doesn't it!