capturing another honey bee swarm

Note: If you are in the king or snohomish county area and you run across a bee swarm, call me and I'll come get them for free. 206 940 4980. If you want to try capturing a swarm yourself, I'll describe how to do it with a cardboard box or two at the bottom of this post.

My bees surprised me again with another early swarm. Bees swarm at the warmest part of the day, usually around 2pm. So these guys are right on time. This time they flew about 200' before they landed, and they picked an odd spot to land in -- underneath my chicken brooding trailer.

you can see the mass of bees right above the wheel. This is about 15 or 20 minutes after they've swarmed, so most of the bees are in the lump.

So I go get a box from a hive that starved out last winter and do a quick check of the frames, making sure that everything is ok. Bees wax turns dark with use, or when the bees use that comb for raising larvae, so this is an old brood comb. I'll scrape off the extra wax, shake off the dead bees and look (and smell) for signs of disease. If it looks ok the drawn comb will give the new swarm a headstart on making a go of it.

Here's a sheet of wax that the bees had only partially drawn out. you can see it's flat at either end, but in the center there's a raised area. The new hive will finish out this comb.

Now back to the swarm. Still quite a few bees flying around, but most of them are bunched up.

I'm lucky that they've chosen an area about 2' above the ground. Makes the capture easy, again. Well, not as easy as the last time, but pretty easy.

Same process. Need a space in the box, so I remove two combs and then carefully slide the hive in underneath the swarm. The opening is directly below the biggest mass of bees.

Now carefully and gently, I take my bare hand and brush the bees off the bottom of the trailer onto and into the box. I want complete masses of bees to fall in, so I'm running my hand across the bottom of the trailer and huge clumps of bees are falling about 12-18" into the box. this picture is seconds after the masses of bees fell into the box. Most of them are filling the opening where the two frames were.

Now I set the top of the hive on, but very loosely. The bees can get into the hive from all sizes. Notice the two bees that are sticking their rear ends up in the air. they're "fanning" -- they're broadcasting the smell of the queen by fanning their wings, giving the swarm a better chance of regrouping. If all goes well the queen is already in the box, and this fanning will draw the rest of the swarm into the box.
Ok. Now 20 minutes later i carefully lift the lid and look. The bees are all over the combs, they're liking their new home. I've probably captured the queen. So I carefully lower the lid on properly, limiting the entry/exit from the hive to the front only. When I lower it I lower it .25", and then raise it up, then lower it again, then raise it up. That allows any bees that would be squished a chance to get out of the way. you can feel the top land gently on bees, so after 4 or 5 raises and lowers, I feel it start to hit wood, so i put it on for good.

Tomorrow I'll go back and insert the two frames I removed, and then I leave the new queen and her hive alone for a week or so so they can make themselves at home. After dark I'll put a piece of wood across the entrance and move the hive to where I want it to be. When the bees wake up they'll be in their new location.

capturing a bee swarm with cardboard boxes

I'm describing what I do to capture swarms. If you find yourself covered in bees and running through the neighborhood begging for death, that's not my fault.

First, it's handy to have two medium sized cardboard boxes. One box you'll use to carry the bees from where ever they landed, and the other box you'll use to contain the captured bees. This is the way to deal with a swarm of bees that is formed into a lump like I've shown above.

if the bees are somewhere you can put the box under them, open your capture box and do that. leave it open. Gently dislodge the bees into your capture box, and then close it. you don't have to close it tight -- just enough that the bees see the dark and feel secure. Any openings will allow stragglers to join the hive. Your goal is to get the queen. If the queen is in the box, all of the other bees will follow by dark. If she is not, they'll reform around her and you get to try again.

If you cannot get the box under where the swarm is, close your capture box up but cut a hole about the size of a quarter in it, near the bottom of one side. Weave the top so that if you push on the flaps a hole opens in the center. Put your capture box as close to the swarm as you can.

Now take your other box, which I'll call your collection box, put it under the warm and brush or dislodge bees into it. Quickly carry the lump of bees in, and put them into your capture box. Repeat as many times as necessary to get any grouped bees.

Then stand back and watch. Are most of the bees in the box, and the ones that are flying around slowly going into the box? If so, you're done. Wait until dark, seal the box and carry it to their new home. If not, watch where they go and repeat.

A swarm of bees is worth roughly $100 early on. Later in the season they're not worth as much, until September when they have a negative worth. That's because the later swarms have trouble surviving the winter because they don't have enough time to collect honey to carry them through. So you have to feed them all winter.

Hiving a bee swarm

click on pictures for bigger versions
One of my bigger hives surprised me today and swarmed. I thought there was a possibility, so when I was walking by and saw the "beard of bees" hanging out the entrance, I figured it was today. It was warm and sunny -- the bees think that this kind of day is the day for a road trip.

Bees swarm when they think that the hive is too crowded. For me its unusual to see a swarm this early in the year. I usually see them in mid to late june, but that's ok. An early swarm is actually better -- they have a good chance to grow big enough to survive the winter. So this isn't a bad thing for me. it's like lambing, but with bees. I get a new hive out of it.

What bees do in preparation for a swarm is they start feeding and raising 4 to 8 larvae as queens. A day or two before the larvae hatch, the old queen leaves the hive emitting a "follow me" scent. A big group of bees does follow. The process looks like a tornado. In taking these pictures I'm surrounded by 20 to 30,000 bees. Just before they leave the hive they gorge themselves on honey for their trip. So they're full and not really into fighting. They bump into me as a take the picture, but I'm not stung. I'm wearing a t-shirt and jeans. no protective gear.

I walk off to give them time to settle, and about 15 minutes later see that they're gathering around a blackberry bush. The queen has landed there, and the rest of the workers will surround her, forming a solid mass of bees. I'm able to look at this group of bees and I'd estimate it at 3lbs of bees -- call it 25,000 workers.

They gather in smaller and smaller flights, eventually forming a very tight mass

Back at the hive are the bees that know that a swarm is going out, but missed the smell of the queen. They'll hang out in the entrance, but since the queen is gone, they'll not fly off.

The bees have formed two lumps under a blackberry vine. It's a handy spot, about 2' above the ground. I'm grateful for that. It makes hiving them very easy.

I grab an empty hive I have, but you can do this with a cardboard box with a couple of holes cut in it, and remove two frames from it. I remove the frames so that the swarm will drop into the hive when I shake the blackberry vine. I want the largest number of bees into the box at once. I'll replace the two frames in a few hours if things go well.

Ok. Having shaken the bees into the hive, I slide the top of the hive in. There's still a couple of bees hanging there, and there are bees all over the branches on either side, and flying around. I'd guess I've got about 12,000 bees in the hive, and the rest are flying. Now I wait.

If the bees go into the hive and stay, I've captured the queen and all is well. If they reform a ball or fly a short distance and reform the ball that means I didn't get the queen, and I start over again.

They're going into the box. Now I want as many of these bees as I can -- the more bees I can capture the better the colony will do later. Every worker is needed. So I leave the frames out and the top a little off so that there's plenty of places for the bees to go in. I'll go back around sunset, remove the top, replace the frames and then put the top back on the hive. Now I haven't been wearing any protective gear while hiving them but when I go back a few hours later and put those frames back in I'll want to be wearing a head protector. At that point the bees will have decided that's their hive and they will defend it. Review: A new swarm can be handled with low risk of being stung. But if they've colonized something and have been there for a few hours, they'll sting you if you mess with them.

You can see the lid of the hive at the bottom right of this photo, and the frames I took out at the bottom left. They only flew about 25 feet before settling on the bush. Very agreeable bees.

Here's what a hive looks like that isn't swarming. There's a few bees here and there, but not the masses hanging out of the doorway. I've narrowed this doorway with a stick (the unpainted wood in this photo) so that this hive can easily defend itself against other hives stealing its honey or supplies.

When you capture a swarm, you can take that opportunity to have the hive make new comb. In this case I had drawn comb (comb that was already fully formed by other bees) to give them, so they've got a huge head start, but if I were giving them wax sheets to make comb out of I'd be inclined to feed them some sugar to help that process. Since we're at the start of the bloom in this area, and they've already got drawn comb, I will not feed these bees unless they don't thrive for some reason. I'll leave them alone for 7 days and then pop the top on the hive and look to see that everything is ok. If things go well I should see newly laid eggs.

Bee pollen

Click on the picture for a larger version. The bees have found something that is producing pollen. Probably alder, maybe maple. The two bees in the center of the picture have pollen on their rear legs. One has yellow pollen, the other, in front of it, orange pollen.

Pollen is a high-protein food that bees use directly, and feed to their larvae. They also store it in the combs, usually close to where larvae are being raised. Since I've started feeding them they've switched their forage from nectar (which there's not much of this time of year) to pollen.

I had pretty good survival this year; out of my 45 hives I lost 2; normal losses for me are 15-20%. The primary difference I think is the screen bottom board, which both allows bee mites (a type of bee parasite) to drop through, and provides more ventilation, which seems to keep the hive dryer.

Bees & Beekeeping

Received 10 hive top feeders from betterbee today and fed the hives 100lbs of sugar to give them a boost at the start of the season. They'll eat part of the sugar directly, make new comb with it, and store some of it. Giving them a source of food means that they won't rob from other hives as much and that the queen gets the signal that "spring is here". It usually takes 2-3 months for a hive to get to full capacity (and start thinking about swarming) so providing easy food here gets the laying started.





Plus the hivetop feeders are better for the beekeeper (me). The russian bees really are little bastards, and this type of feeder allows me to pop the top off the hive without opening it.

There's a little plastic guard on each end of the feeder that allows the bee to climb up and over the lip of the feeder, but not escape. So I don't get stung when I'm refilling it. I like this approach a LOT better than the mason jar feeder or front of hive feeder, both of which I've gotten stung multiple times using.

If you are considering having bees this year you MUST FIND YOUR PACKAGE SUPPLIER NOW or you'll miss the window of package bees being available. Packages are 3 or 4 lbs of bees plus a young queen. If you get them now, and feed the hive, it has enough time to bulk up before the primary nectar flow.

Bees and beekeeping, farming calendar

Today was cool and sunny; and the bees were out of the hive flying around. From the looks of their legs on the return trip something is producing pollen nearby. Pollen is a high-protein food for bees, and is used to feed both the bees and their larvae.

If you've considered beekeeping, now is the time of year to make your decision. The easiest way to start is to find a local apiary supply place nearby. I'm sure they'll be happy to help you. I've been patronizing the beez neez in snohomish, but there are many suppliers around. Packages of bees are only available once a year -- so you need to locate and order them NOW to have bees this year. More about packages further on in this post.

On a sunny day like today is when I open the hives for the spring check. I'm looking to see which colonies have survived the winter and which haven't, and what their relative strengths are. I'll open the hive, heft the super to see how much honey remains, look at a couple of frames, and then switch the top box of the two to the bottom. Over the winter the bees will have gravitated up into the honey, and by reversing the two boxes it allows them to gravitate up again as they grow during the spring.

Modern bee hives consist of standardized boxes referred to by their size. a "super" is about 6" tall, a "deep super" is about 10", and each holds a number of frames that the bees will build their comb on. The comb is used to store honey, pollen and to raise and brood young.

In my climate, the basic hive consists of two deep supers on a bottom board, with a roof. Later in the year I'll add additional supers that the bees will fill with honey, and anything above the first two deep supers is what I'll harvest. Between the harvested honey and the original deep super I'll put a queen excluder, which will prevent the queen from laying larvae in the top supers to keep the honey pure. A deep super that's full of honey weighs around 100lbs. A super weighs about 60lbs. A hive will produce 120lbs of honey on a good year here; in some areas with longer nectar flows and warmer weather you can get 200lbs of honey in a season.

At this time of year the hives are at low ebb; they've been living on stored honey all winter, and the bees are as old as bees ever get. The bees that are born in the fall end up living through the spring, usually around 6 months.

My winter losses this year was 15%. Not bad, not great. Average. The hives that survived have lots of bees, still have some honey, but not much. So I'll feed them a little sugar syrup, 50% water and 50% sugar by volume, for a month or so.

I'll also be ordering packages of bees from beez neez. A package is 3 or 4 lbs of bees with a queen. They're only available early in the year, which is why I'm suggesting that you make your decision now about whether you want bees. When the package bee season passes you're out of luck. A 3lb package should cost you around $75, give or take $10, a 4lb a little more. If this is your first beekeeping exercise, buy the 4lb package. More bees means that they have a better chance of producing some honey for you this year even if you make some mistakes.

In this area there are several different varieties of bees I can order. My opinions:

Italian bees: Sweet, good natured bees. You can work them without protective gear or smoke, even. I do it every year. But susceptible to mites and have a low survival for me. I keep trying them, but they're just not working for me.

Russian bees: Angry little bastards, but they produce honey, lots of it, and are surviving well for me. I cannot work these guys without protective gear, and in fact, there are times when I cannot walk within 10 feet of their hive without getting stung. That said, most of my hives are now russian because they've survived well.

New world carnolian: Somewhere between russians and italians. Survive better than italians, not as angry as the russians. I don't get stung by these guys randomly.

Minnesota Hygenic: I've had mixed luck on these guys. They seem to do well against mites, but their winter survival for me isn't as good as russian or new world carnolian. Production is roughly the same as carnolian.