Laurence Edwards captures his first swarm of 2020 in a bait hive and transfers it to a new box using drawn comb. He assesses the small swarm's size by watching how the bees cluster, bumps them into their new home, and will watch for absconding if the weather stays warm.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Blackmans in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Really sorry about the poor camera, I've forgotten my tripod today, so you have to make do with a really, really bad camera angle. Just wanted to give you a quick video though to show you we've caught our first swarm of 2020. So early May, I predicted it, I knew the swarms are going to come this week. The colonies are getting big and the weather's getting nice, so here we go, we've got our first swarm in a bait hive. So there's no cheating here, do you know what I mean? You saw this video go up, this is where we put this bait hive and this is where we've caught the swarm. So let's get a bit closer and take a look at it. So as you can see, really, really nice swarm. Not sure if it's kind of filling the box and just bearding out or just clustering on the outside. If it's just clustering on the outside, then it's a pretty small swarm. But let's, let's get it down and take a look. So from the way it's clustering on the outside like that, I'm pretty certain it's only a little baby. I don't think it's actually filling the box, but still, we'll open it up and take a look. So easiest way to do this is going to be to bump them into a different box just so I can kind of get the majority of the bees in there. Drawn comb is your friend here. It's going to help them stay and not fly off. Um, so I'm going to put some drawn comb in this box here and bump them in. Yeah, it was only a baby, so it's just got the bees on the front there. So we'll continue this one together, pump the rest of the bees in, get the lid on. So it was only a small one. We'll get it back up there just to catch all the stragglers. They're inside now, so hopefully they should stay in there. Um, I'm not going to kind of fuss if They abscond. If they abscond, they go. Put a couple of pieces of drawn comb in there for them, hopefully they'll stay. So we'll check back and see what it's like later. So that's it. Sorry, it's a really, really rubbish video. I'll have to make sure I've got the tripod in the car next time. But you know what I mean, we're into swarm season. I expect to see loads more swarms in the kind of upcoming weeks if this weather stays nice. So stay tuned and we'll catch some swarms next time.
