Year: 2012

A swarm in May …

Posted on by dodman

Two weeks ago, we had a swarm of bees in our garden. I don’t think it was from our own colony, though it might have been. I caught it and popped it into a fresh hive I had made for just such an occasion.

Today, we had another swarm, this time from our original, top bar hive. For five minutes, the air was a maelstrom of frantic buzzing. Then, they settled on a low branch and I debated what to do.

Eventually, I hit on a cunning wheeze. I would take the roof off my new hive, lay a sheet of newspaper across the top, add a storey with some empty frames, tip the swarm into this, and then pop the lid back on. By the time the bees from below, or possibly the new ones above, ate through the newspaper and discovered their neighbours, they would hopefully have forgotten their allegiance was to different queens and would happily coexist.

Naturally, one queen would have to be sacrificed, but I would leave it to the bees to decide which.

The plan didn’t run faultlessly. I shook the branch the swarm was on in the approved manner, and a largish chunk of bees dropped into the box I was holding, but I couldn’t persuade the others to follow, and the queen must have been amongst them, because when I spilled those I had caught into their new home, they vacated it within an hour and were soon back on their tree branch again.

So, I had another go, this time cutting through the inch thick branch they were hanging from and carrying it, with the bees clinging on, and to each other, in a writhing mass, across the garden, through the greenhouse, to ‘apiary corner’.

The oddest part of this scheme is that the topbar hive the swarm came from is only a few feet from the hive they’re now in; but they’re supposed to have no memory of ever having been there. I’m not sure you can put them back in their original hive, though.

I googled this solution, which, if it works, seems the perfect method of swarm control.