My First Swarm Collection

Myself Jane and Maddy were round a friends house on a quiet Saturday morning for tea and chatter, and as we were leaving a few hours later we walked down their driveway, and the sky was full of bees.

My eyes lit up, and I was blown away by what I saw. Jane, however, was not so keen and decided that she was going to take our 1-year-old daughter home while I walked down the road following these bees to their final resting place.

About 20 minutes later, they had landed in a garden, and I decided that the best thing to do would be to knock on their door and ask if I can come and get them.

The lady who owned the property was heavily into her 90s, and I think she understood what I meant, and she allowed me into her garden to go and look for these bees.

The bees had chosen an overgrown bramble infested resting place, and at this point, I thought crap, what do I do now?

Yup, I called another beekeeper to come and show me how to do this and make myself not look too stupid in front of this old lady.

It was going to be a few hours before Paul could get to me to show me how to catch a swarm, so I relaxed in the sunshine in my friends garden waiting and drinking even more tea wearing my bee suit in full sunshine.

Paul arrived, and we found an old cardboard box and walked round to the property where the swarm had landed. Paul told me to find a beautiful flat area to put the cardboard box.

Well, I found a lovely patch of flat grass, well I say grass it was reeds, and it was a pond, I was now up to my gentleman sausage in water, and Paul is laughing, and I am cursing that the old lady had forgotten to mention that there was a Flippin pond hidden in here garden.

To get the swarm in the box, we got some secateurs and gently cut away the bramble branches and put them in the cardboard box and slowly do that until as many of the bees are in the box. We then flipped the box over on some flat ground (that is not a pond) and then wedged the bottom of the box open, and we headed back to my friends for a cup of tea and cool down and dry off.

The idea of opening the box a little is that the queen bee will be in the box and the rest of the colony in the box will be signalling to the bees that are flying about the garden that the queen is now in the box. As the day draws to a close, all the bees will hopefully end up in the box

Once we were sure most of the bees were in the box, we headed round to where I keep my bees and opened up a spare national beehive. At this point, I remembered that there was a wedding going on next door and I had to be very careful not to piss these bees off too much so that they don’t become a nuisance that the wedding party.

Luckily the bees dropped into their new home, and we put the queen excluder on the bottom of the hive above the entrance to hopefully stop the queen escaping and swarming again.

That was that my first swarm collection and it was not as bad as I expected and although I got drenched I did not get stung and so that to me is a success.