In this on‑location beekeeping video, the host (Laurence Edwards) and his assistant Zane encounter a massive honey‑bee swarm high in a conifer tree during peak swarm season. The swarm originates from a hive that contains an expensive pure Buckfast breeder queen valued at about £500 ($700). The host explains the problem – a compressed colony has swarmed – and demonstrates a step‑by‑step rescue using a telescopic swarm‑catcher pole fitted with a frame of comb to attract the bees. He lowers the frame into the tree, captures a portion of the swarm, and then uses a white sheet and a nuc box with a queen excluder to isolate the queen. Once the queen is secured inside the nuc, the pheromone she releases draws the remaining bees down into the box. The host repeatedly lowers frames, shakes bees into the nuc, and finally gathers the entire swarm. He then packages the queen‑containing nuc for delivery to fellow beekeeper "Just Alex" for future garden videos, noting that the queen’s pedigree makes the nuc especially valuable. The narrative blends instructional beekeeping techniques with real‑time problem solving and a personal anecdote about sharing a prized queen.
Chapters
This is the problem, Zane. Oh wow. You see one? Where? There, right in the middle. Great spot. Why? Big tap, big tap. Ah! Zane! That could not have gone any worse. Oh, shit. Right, Zane, come here. Check this out, mate. Right, come right close in. You see all those bees rushing to escape out of that beehive there? So what's happened in here, I compressed a lot of colonies down, and there are too many bees inside this beehive now. It is a very warm, sunny day, 3 days away from the summer equinox. So we are in prime swarm season, and this colony here is doing one thing right now. It is swarming as we speak. So I'm gonna leave 'em to it. We're gonna see where they cluster up. Maybe I'll catch them, maybe I won't. Maybe they'll go to another home. The queen in here is a very expensive queen. There is a £500 queen in here. That's a $700 queen. So I don't really want 'em to swarm, but I can't do anything to stop them now. They are on their way. Let's go and find these bees. I could hear the roar looking over there. I think they're over here somewhere. You hear it? Yeah. Swarm. That's cool, no? And what's going to be even more cool here, Xane, is I can see where they're clustering. You see it? It's that branch there. Oh yeah. Yeah, so we're going to be able to get our swarm catcher down. We'll catch them. But that is a big swarm. So that did not take long. You could hear the roar of the bees, and then we looked up there and they're quite clearly right above us, a huge black cloud swarm of bees there. But what's even cooler is that this colony here is clustering up on a conifer tree. It's about 5 meters above my head, and I have got the perfect tool to catch them and get them back in the box. So whilst Zane has been off eating his tuna sandwich for lunch, I have been here trying to keep the bees in the tree, Zane, because they are determined to go away. Now you're definitely going to be wondering what this is. What is this big orange pole? This is the swarm catcher. This is how you get frames up into the tree, and this is how you get those swarms that are out of reach into boxes just like this. So the idea behind the swarm catcher is you can kind of reach the swarms that are very high up in trees. All I've got at the top of this massive This massive long pole here is just a frame of comb. The bees like frames of comb. They smell it, they know that it's home. And the idea is that I'm going to fish the bees out of the tree up there and try and get them into the box. Now, if I can find the queen, I'll cage that queen, I'll place her in there, I'll let all of the bees fly up into the air, and hopefully they'll all come back to this box here. You never really know with swarms how it's going to go, and you don't know what they've left behind in the box. But let's get on with it. Let's see if we can get this swarm out of the tree and into a box. Right, so you can see, Zane, I've got a massive cluster of the swarm up there. That's the easy bit. Yeah, the difficult bit is getting it down on this huge telescopic pole without all of these falling off. Always going to lose a few, and I've not got my bee suit on, so if they fly up, this could be a little bit dangerous as well. So it looks as easy as that, but believe me, it takes a little bit of skill to get them down and not bump them off. But the strange thing is, once I get them down to here, all I'm going to do is bump them straight in here, get the lid on, get the frame back up there, and we'll see how many times we have to go up to get that massive swarm down. So we've got a good chunk of the swarm in here and they are roaring. They're either roaring because the queen isn't in here or they're roaring because the queen is in here. Either way, I'm going to get the rest of the bees because that's probably only about a quarter of the bees that were up there. Right, so what I'm thinking, Zane, is I kind of want to see if there's a queen in there. And when you bump them in like that, it is quite hard to see if they're there. So we're going to run some in using a white sheet and get them in the entrance, see if we can see the queen. Yeah, okay, so I'm gonna open up the entrance. You see one? Where? There, right in the middle. Oh, great spot. Right, I need to get that queen in. I need to get her by her wing, that's what I need to do. Right, good. Watch. You got her? Yep. Right, so now that the queen's in there, all of these bees are going to want to come in. Watch them all start to move and transition to where the queen is. They're fanning her pheromone out, and all of these bees up in the air now are going to want to get into here. Now, to make sure that the queen doesn't come out, I'm just going to move that round into the queen excluder function, which means now only bees can get The bees can get in and out, but the queen cannot get out. She is trapped. So we found the queen. The queen is inside the nuc, trapped behind that queen excluder. All of these bees will eventually make their way in, but there's a massive swarm still up in the tree. So I could use this and just keep on taking them down frame by frame by frame, and that would work really, really well. However, now that we've got the queen in here, I should be able to lure every single one of those bees from the sky into this box. That is the plan. So you can see just while the bees are all going crazy up there, they have worked it out down here. They want into this nuc. They can smell it. They're all moving through. And as I get more bees down, I'll chuck them in. And it seems the more bees that you can get here with the queen inside, the faster they all move in. Oh my God, Xane, look at the pressure. Oh wow. Oh man. Well, I'm going to drop them down in there, yeah? Yeah. Okay, you good? Ready? Yeah. Right, they should all go in there. They're all just flying back up, aren't they? Oh, right, let's give this another go, Zane. So you're going to shake them into the nuc? Yeah, you're going to take the lid off. Okay. I'm going to place it over the nuc, you're going to take the lid off, we shake. Teamwork. Right, I'm gonna bump them. So lid off, but take it right off. I'll tell you what, when you take it off, you need to tap the lid to get all the bees. Yeah, tap it. Go, big tap, big tap. Ah, same. That could not have gone— Teamwork. Any worse. I really hope the queen wasn't in that roof. Oh, what can we do? Let's hope she's up there. Yeah. So we just came back to get the rest of the bees out of the tree, and look what is happening now. There are no bees left up in the tree. They took to the sky, and because the queen is inside this box here and all of those bees are puffing that pheromone around, they are attracting every single bee down, and they are trying to get into this box. So all that is left to do is to place this lid over the top of the bees really carefully and wait for every single bee to go into this nuc. So what's next for this colony here? This is a huge swarm of bees that left a hive over there today, and all I'm going to do is I'm just going to go and put them back. So there we go, the queen and the bees back in the box, but that is not where the story ends. If you remember, this queen here is a very expensive pure Buckfast breeder queen. Now, whilst we've been running the videos in the background here today, I've been packaging up 2 special breeder queen nucs to send to Just Alex to do some videos in his garden. But you know what? I think Alex would prefer a nuc with a story, so I'm going to send him this one.
