It’s Swarming Time

Bee swarm in the cedar tree

It has been another exciting spring in the bee yard. May is swarming time, and beekeepers all around have been talking of swarms they’ve lost and ones they’ve caught. Beekeepers new and old have been eagerly waiting for new queens and package bees to arrive. Art Gelder from WalkAbout Acres had orders for something like 300 packages and I don’t know how many queens. We had ordered two Carniolan queens and were looking forward to their arrival on April 30. Our plan was to split the aggressive hive toward the left of the bee yard and give each box a new queen, meaning we would end up with four hives altogether.

The week before the queens were to arrive, on a partly sunny day, we drove down to the bee yard. When we arrived, Jim drove the truck out into the field as usual but made a wider loop along the row of cedar trees, looking up into the branches as he drove. Just before he got to the yard, he stopped and put the truck in reverse, then drove backwards a few feet, stopped, and pointed to a branch about fourteen feet off the ground, where a large swarm of bees was clustered among the cedar needles. We were fortunate to have discovered the swarm before the queen managed to take off for unknown parts with half the worker bees and our hopes of a good harvest this fall, but I could not see how we were going to get the swarm out of the tree. I had helped Jim catch one swarm before, but that particular swarm had settled on a branch lower down in the cedar, so it was a simple matter of taking the loppers and cutting the branch off behind the swarm, then shaking the bees down into an empty hive body.  But this new swarm was much higher up in the tree. There was also no way of knowing how long the swarm had been there and whether they might fly en masse to a new location while we were trying to figure out how to catch them.

While Jim was forming his plan, he went over to the stack of empty boxes and started moving hive bodies and supers around, checking to see whether he had enough good frames to put together a suitable box for the swarm, noticing in disgust that mice had gotten into some of the boxes and torn up the comb. He found a couple of boards and bricks to use as a base, which we moved closer to the swarm. After we had assembled a new hive (bottom board, screen, hive body, ten frames, top), he said, “Let’s go see if Hank and Marie have a ladder we can borrow and some loppers and maybe a saw. I looked up again at the hive high in the tree and tried to imagine where we would lean a ladder if we had one, among all those prickly branches. Or if we could somehow get a step ladder under there, would any of us be tall enough to reach the branch with the hive? And then what?

When we helloed the house, Hank came out in his sock feet and greeted us as warmly as if he had been expecting us all along. He said with a smile that he had been working with his ham radio and thought at first that our knocking was some sort of Morse code communication. Jim told him what we were looking for, and Hank slipped on his boots and led us out back to the tool shed, where he lifted the loppers and a saw off the wall and handed them to Jim. He pointed out an eight-foot step ladder near the porch that we determined was probably not going to be tall enough, then we went on down the path to the machine shed looking for his extension ladder. When he didn’t find it in any of the usual locations, he called Marie on her cell phone to see if she knew where the ladder was, and she reminded him that his son had borrowed it to paint his house. So Hank called his son, who was on his way to St. Louis, to ask him where the ladder was and let him know that we needed to borrow the ladder back to catch a swarm of bees.

Soon after, Marie returned from a friend’s house with bags of fresh produce that she began dividing up to share with us. Hank and Jim got in the truck and headed off along a gravel road to retrieve the extension ladder from the other house, while Marie and I walked across the field along the creek to the bee hives and talked about how we were going to get the hive out of the tree. It was a gorgeous day, in the upper sixties, with periods of sun and shade, and it felt great to be with friends on such a lovely spring day, figuring out together what to do next, tossing out ideas, inventing tools and procedures, in great confidence that we would ultimately come up with a workable solution. When we all met back at the cedar tree, we decided the first step was to cut back the smaller outside branches so we could get the ladder under the large branch where the swarm was still clustered tightly together, while a few scout bees searched the nearby woods for a suitable home for the hive. As we were lopping and sawing off branches and dragging them off down the fence row, someone suggested that we could use some kind of forked stick to hold up the branch with the swarm while someone else used a chain saw to make a partial cut near the trunk, and maybe we could use the forked stick as a support to control the branch as the weight brought it down to the ground. Marie went back up to the house to get the chain saw, and by the time she got back, Jim had fashioned a sturdy forked stick out of a branch from the tree.

We decided the step ladder would be tall enough after all, so Hank moved it over near the trunk, then climbed up with his chain saw, while Jim and Marie positioned the forked stick under the branch between the swarm and the trunk. Marie preferred that I stay back from the swarm and let them handle the saws and forked sticks and all, since I had just last summer had an allergic reaction to a couple bee stings at their place, which brought out the first responders from Ashland and the ambulance from Columbia. Although swarms are typically not aggressive, I was still somewhat nervous around bees since my reaction, so I sat in my “bug baffler” on the tailgate of the truck and watched as Jim and Marie braced the forked stick against the branch and Hank started the chainsaw and queried, “Ready?” Then apparently, Hank’s new chainsaw cut more quickly than his old one, the branch began falling much more quickly than we had expected, the branch began to sway, Jim and Marie had trouble holding the stick steady, and suddenly half the swarm fell down in a clump on their heads.

By then, thousands of bees were flying everywhere. Jim told Marie he could handle the branch and that she should get away from the bees, so she began walking calmly but quickly across the field toward the creek. Since I had my bee veil on, I took Marie’s place and helped Jim guide the branch with the remaining bees down to the ground, not as slowly as we had originally imagined, but slowly enough. After the branch was most of the way down, I moved the bee box closer, and Jim shook the rest of the bees into the box. Then we all stood and watched in amazement for a good while as thousands of bees began pouring into the box. Later, I asked Hank and Marie what they had been planning to do before we showed up and got them involved in catching this swarm, and they said, “This, of course. This is absolutely what we were meant to do today.

Capturing a swarm

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