Prairie Fields Farm: Honeybee Swarm

Recently one of our beehives swarmed. This is the result of an overcrowded hive and you see it a lot in the spring. The hive has been busy rearing up the next generation and before long there is no more room! Basically what happens is the Queen Bee leaves the hive and takes a good half of the hive or so with her. They take up residence temporarily in a new location. This can be a tree branch, the side of your home, a bush, you might be surprised. Scout bees then fly around trying to find a new permanent home for the colony. A swarm may stay in their temporary location for a number of days...a good week is not uncommon. When bees swarm it sounds like a mighty roar of bees. When this hive swarmed it looked like a giant dark cloud of bees in the bee yard. It really is quite a sight to see!! Below is the swarm all clustered together on a honeysuckle branch. Lucky for us it was only about five feet from the original hive. I didn't even need a ladder!

The queen is in the middle of that giant ball of bees! We generally try to collect swarms when we have them and when we can safely get to them. After all, it's a new free hive of bees! Being five months pregnant with our next child I was a little hesitant this year. It seems that while I'm pregnant if I get stung, I swell up so bad! But, after talking to one of our beekeeping friends we were convinced and decided to go ahead! It's actually not too hard to collect a swarm. All you really need for the short term is a cardboard box if you don't have a hive ready to go. We happened to have an extra brood chamber that we just drilled a hold into until the new hive pieces came a few days later. So, the first thing I did was trim as many of the little branches that were in the way. You have to be able to get a good hard shake to knock all the bees down into your box that you hold right under the swarm. For us, once they were in the cardboard box they then went into the brood chamber box that we had set up waiting for them. You can see me literally dumping the heavy box of bees into their new home!

Once we had the bees in the brood chamber box, we put a piece of wood on top with a large weight on top of that. This would serve as their home for what was about a week until we got the rest of the hive components that we needed. Now we were very lucky that this swarm was so close to where we set up the hive. You can see the bush that they collected on right in the background! If you have to move a swarm too far from where they collected, about 10-20 feet or so, all the scout bees won't be able to find their way back to the group.

The bees took to this new location very well and very fast. Within a week they had drawn all this lovely white comb and the queen was thriving. This is much better than last year. The swarm we collected last year did not do well from the get-go and it didn't take long for the hive to fail. That swarm had collected on a branch above our barn and he had a difficult time getting them down. Plus, we had to move the swarm much farther than 20ft. so I know we lost a lot of the group. Here was this years collected swarm the next day.