How to Catch a Bee Swarm

by Claire Godschalk

Spring is in full swing here at Beardsley Farm…the wildflower meadow is blooming, the greens are bulging, peas are curling their way around the trellis, and honeybees energetically flit from flower to flower.  But what about those honeybees?  What exactly are they doing?

Everyone knows that bees make honey.  But there’s so much more to bees than just being honey-making machines.  Spring is an especially exciting time for the bees, because not only do they gear up their honey production, they also begin to expand their brood rapidly after a tough winter.  A honeybee colony’s numbers drastically reduce during the winter months, and they are fairly inactive, simply focusing on keeping the hive warm!  So when spring finally resurfaces, the bees become busier than ever.

But it is a delicate balance between reproduction and honey making, as we are learning here at Beardsley Farm.  As beekeepers, it is our job to manage the hive.  We mostly care about the honey production – we make sure the bees have enough empty frames to store more and more honey as the weather gets warmer.  But we also need to be aware of the space necessary for reproduction.  In the spring, bees’ natural instinct is to swarm.  Swarming is a way for the bees to create more colonies – there isn’t enough space for more reproduction in their own hive, and so they prepare for a segment of the population to leave the hive and start over.  You may have seen those crazy pictures of thousands of bees crawling over a person’s arms or even face!  Well, as scary as that looks, the truth is that bees engorge themselves in honey in preparation for the swarm.  This means that their thoraxes are so full that they literally cannot sting you – their body just won’t bend that way anymore!  This is true for the majority of the bees in the swarm, though several keep their ability to sting just in case they run into any trouble.

So, as beekeepers, we want to prevent swarming from happening, because we like to keep as many bees as possible to yield that maximum amount of honey.  There are several methods we can use to prevent a swarm from forming.  What we will do in the future (whoops, we messed it up this year, which has lead to some fun adventures…see below) is something called “checkerboarding.”  This means that in the brood supers (brood meaning baby bees), we will alternate an already-in-use frame with a new, empty frame.  This naturally prevents swarming because the bees look around and think “Oh look, we’ve got enough room for reproduction and honey.  Great.  We don’t need to leave.”

If you don’t get to the bees early enough in the spring, though, they will begin swarm preparation.  Scout bees will be sent out to find a new location for a hive.  They report back to the colony, specifically the queen.  The queen judges whether or not it will be sufficient and if it’s not, she sends the scout bees back out.  In the meantime, the queen begins laying new queen eggs.  A bee larvae becomes a queen when the nurse bees feed her “royal jelly.”  This substance is another secretion of bees, and makes the queen grow larger than your average bee.  It also gives her special reproductive properties.  A beekeeper can tell that the colony is getting ready to swarm if he/she finds large peanut-like cells, or queen cells, on the bottom of the frames.

When a new, virgin queen is born during swarming time her first instinct is to kill all of the rival queens ready to be born.  However, the colony will prevent this from happening.  Subsequently, if several virgin queens are present in the hive, they will fight to the death to head the colony.  Frequently the older queen will be the one leading a swarm to their new home.  Which brings us to another method of controlling swarms – “old school” beekeepers used to crush the new queen cells.  Without multiple queens, it is impossible for the colony to leave the hive.

However, with several queens present, one queen will rush through the hive for 5 or 10 minutes beating her wings rapidly to signal that it is time to swarm.  The bees will line up and begin flying in a 30 to 40 foot circles above the hive.  This is when inexperienced beekeepers know they are in trouble.  The bees will gradually settle on an intermediate spot before continuing onto their new home.

Couldn’t we just catch them and put them back in their hive?  No.  Not unless you wait an entire life cycle of the bee (8 weeks) for the old brood of bees to die, and new ones to emerge.  Only then could you reintroduce them into their former colony.  A new colony will only be established outside of a 5 mile radius from the old one (bees collect honey in a 5 mile radius from their hive).

Hopefully, the bees will decide to settle on a branch low to the ground which makes it fairly easy to catch them.  If not, you can always attempt to knock down the branch they are on, wait for them to settle down, and do what we did in the photos below.

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