Bee Swarms 2009

2009 turned out to be a typical year for bee swarms as we received just about 20 swarm calls this year.  No great pictures this year as it seemed most swarm calls came in during the day when I was working.

Last year was extremely crazy with bee swarms and you can read about 2008 below.

2008 is turning out to be our busiest year for collecting swarms in well over 10 years.  It's July 1st and we've collected 15 swarms.  In 2007, we only had 4 the entire year.  After speaking with other beekeepers around the U.S. many are just like us - running out of equipment to house them in.  In addition to our honey business, we are busy building and maintaining beehives of our own.  Below are some pictures from swarms we've collected.

This first one was just collected in June 2008 at a nursing home in our town.  They were cutting down a large Maple Tree when they were surprised at what they found!  After the tree hit the ground bees starting buzzing:) Glenn took his chain saw and had to cut the tree open to expose them.

   

He then took the parts of the tree and shook many bees into the hive. 

 

After shaking lots of bees into the new hive, he then started to remove the chunks of comb honey which were within the tree.  We were lucky and found the queen bee pretty quickly and placed her into the new hive which makes it a bunch easier to get the other bees to follow her into the hive.  After he got the bees off the honey comb and into the hive, he placed the honey comb into buckets with lids. 

 

After he is done removing the comb and cleaning out the inside of the tree, he will place a hive body directly above where the bees were and leave this here overnight.  The temperatures were pretty hot and in the mid 80's late into the evening.  During the night particularly if it is cold outside the bees will find their way into this new hive by the scent of the queen.  We then went and picked up the new hive around 5am before the bees started to fly and brought it back to one of our bee yards.

 
Glenn will place a lid on the bee hive and leave it here until the night time giving all the bees time to find their new home.  We also placed sticks from the bottom of the tree up to the bee hive allowing bees to simply walk up to their new house.

The pictures below show our previous swarms we've captured.  Below is an interesting swarm that happened in our own yard.  We had 2 hives next to each other and one was empty.  We were about to move the empty hive down below on our property and place it out to try and capture a swarm.  All of a sudden we heard an incredible buzzing sound and looked out to see bees everywhere.  The bees from 1 hive swarmed and took up "house" right next door in the empty hive. 

I ran out and stood in the middle of the swarm and captured some pictures.  These pictures are not even close to showing all the bees that were flying.  What a "rush" that was and we wish all swarms were this easy to capture.

Some of these pictures I kept pretty large so you can see the swarm.
 

Notice all the bees flying in the area. 


The hive on the right swarmed to the hive on the left.


You can see bees if you look at the pines and all the little "debris" flying in the air are honey bees.  Also below picture shows this some.




This is another close up - we walked right up to the hives and what a sight, we were surrounded by thousands of bees, tried to get my video camera (battery dead!) out and will try to get a small movie clip on the website if I can catch one while they're circling overhead.  It's an amazing sight!

Swarm on May 19th, 2005

We were waiting for one of our hives to swarm and thought it had.  We learned after we caught the swarm that this one came from a tree that had become the home to some of our bees last year from a swarm. 
         
The swarm came from the        The bees swarmed from the tree
center hole in this tree.              & ended up in this small tree area.

  
Glenn starts to trim the area around the swarm to be able to cut the branch holding the swarm.  This branch will then be placed inside a new hive box which is shown below.  We'll leave the bees here until nightfall to make sure we get most of the bees. Then we'll move them to their new location.
    

September 27, 2005 (below)

This hive was actually on a tree branch and we knew about it for about 2 weeks prior to being able to get it.  The only bad part was it was about 40 foot off the ground. 

We were been busy gearing up for the holiday season and knew we had to rush to get it down.  Weather was turning a bit colder at night with winds and heavy rain expected.  Glenn climbed up the tree and threw a rope around the end of the tree and then took a chainsaw to cut the branch off so we could lower the entire limb down to us below.  As you can see from the photo we got it down just before dusk and into a hive just as it started pouring. 

We combined these bees with another hive so they could make it through winter.  What you see through the rain is their comb which is yellowish tan in the picture.  A hive like this that has attached itself to an outside tree branch will freeze to death over winter as the bees try to keep the queen warm.

This is not common for bees to simply make a home on a branch without shelter but it does happen.