This morning while my son was riding his ATV around the yard, he noticed something strange up in a tree. He immediately rode over to his dad telling him, “there sure are a lot of bees up in that tree!” My husband went over to take a look, and sure enough, it was our first swarm of bees!
We called our bee Guru, Hiroshi to help with the situation. Little did we know that our short time of bee keeping experience would turn into an advanced master class that Saturday. When he arrived at the farm, he said we will need the bee smoker, a ladder, and a Super Soaker. I yelled for the kids to bring me their water guns and they obliged in bewilderment. Hiroshi headed up the ladder to wet the bees.
Not having much luck with the water gun approach, Hiroshi gabbed his bee transport box and and climbed the ladder once more to capture the bees.
It was a success!! Hiroshi had captured the bees!!
We learned that bees swarm when a queen leaves the hive. She may leave because the hive is over crowded, or if a new queen was recently born and another queen already rules the hive.
Further investigation of the swarm
Now that we captured the bees, we needed to make sure the primary queen was still in the hive and not part of the swam. We opened up the bee hive and removed each frame until we found the queen. She was still there. The swarm we encountered was due to a virgin queen leaving the hive. While we were inspecting the frames, we noticed several queen cells, so more queens are due to arrive.
Beekeeping note:
If you want more bees for additional hives, you can use the swarm of bees with the virgin queen to start a new hive. If you don’t want more bees, you can leave the swarm in the tree, and they will leave to find a new home within two days.
