How to Add a Swarm to a Long Hive - Hyde Hives - How to Catch a Swarm - Swarm Trapping
In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates how to capture a large, low‑hanging swarm in a forest apiary and transfer it into a long hive. He explains the preparation (bee suit, box placement), the physical capture methods (cutting branches, shaking bees into a box, using a “scare‑crow” hand technique), and the transfer of the swarm from the box into a long hive (removing the lid, tipping the box, pouring onto frames). Edwards then outlines post‑capture management: sealing the hive, providing dark space, adding frames, checking for a queen, monitoring activity over 24 hours, and conducting follow‑up inspections at 5 days, 7 days, and several weeks to assess queen mating status, brood development, and disease risk. He also discusses the orientation behavior of swarms, the misconception about the 3‑mile rule, and the challenges of identifying the source colony. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to try the method, subscribe, and watch the next tutorial on balancing colonies.
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Another day, another swarm, and I'm going to guess this is one of mine. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I'm up in the forest apiary today, just doing a few tasks up here, coming to grab some boxes, and there's a massive swarm in the tree. So this is the first time I've seen it, literally about a minute ago. Quickly get the camera out. I'm going to get it into a box. That for me is low-hanging fruit. That is the easiest swarm in the world to catch. So in this video, I'm going to show you how to catch a really, really easy swarm like that. I would place my mortgage as a bet on the fact that that is one of my swarms. They're very light in color. They're in an apiary of mine already. They're hanging on a branch. Almost certainly one of my swarms. So in this video, you will get to find out if that is one of my colonies. You'll see it all the way through to the end. I'll catch the swarm, I'll stick it in a box, I'll check for a queen, I'll give it a few days, come back, see if there's a mated queen in there. I reckon almost certainly it's one of mine, so I'm expecting to find a blue mated queen in there. So make sure you stay tuned to the end of this video to see how we get on. If you're new to the channel, please hit the subscribe button. We do tons of videos here at Black Mountain Honey, from catching swarms to honey extraction to loads of tips and guidance. Plenty on offer for all beekeepers of all different experiences. I'm going to get my bee suit on today. Sometimes I do the swarm captures without a bee suit on. There are a lot of bees in this apiary, and as soon as they start getting a little bit touchy, I don't want to get stung. So I'm going to put my beekeeping suit on, and I'm going to show you how to catch a swarm like this. So this is a really, really nice swarm. It is absolutely massive, and like I say, I'm certain that it's one of mine. What I'm going to do in this video, I'm going to add this to the hide hives. Long Hive series. So what I'm going to show you today is how to catch that swarm, and all I'm going to do, catch it in a box. All you need is a box to catch a swarm. It's like the easiest thing in the world. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to introduce that swarm that you've caught in a box into your long hive. So we'll follow it through this video, all the stages. First part of the video is we're going to catch a swarm in a box. Right, so you can do this a number of ways. You can just pick the box up close to it, shake them off, Or you can try and cut them off, or you can do a little bit of a combination of the two. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get the box underneath it, try and cut the branch as best as I can, and if I can't get through it with my Leatherman, I'll just shake them off into the box. I've got my long hive over there, so I'm just going to go straight in, get them into the box, shake them into the long hive, and they will be fine. So when bees swarm, they reorientate almost automatically. So if you find a swarm in your own apiary, You can just take that swarm, put it into a new hive in the new apiary, and they will orientate back to that box. It's weird, swarming just seems to reset the orientation button for them. So the rule of taking them 3 miles away goes out the window. You can do it in the same apiary. So I'll get in there now, I'll get the swarm in the box, take it over to the long hive. Right, I've positioned my box directly underneath the swarm. I'm just going to take a couple of these branches off just to give me some good access in. You only really get one chance to cut it off or to shake it off, so you might as well make it as easy as possible. The aim here is to get as many bees as you possibly can. So getting in there, there is about 7 different branches all coming down into that swarm. So cutting it off is not really an option. I'm going to put away my Leatherman Wave because as soon as I cut one branch, half the swarm is going to fall away. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to get the box, lift it up underneath, really big rigorous shake. All the bees should fall into the box. So there we go, all of the bees are in the box. I'm gonna dash over now to the long hive, chuck them in. So there's all my bees in the box. You can see they're trying to clamber up now. They do, they always tend to go upwards, swarms. It's really strange. I'll just get in there though. You can see that is a very big swarm. Really happy with that. Nice big swarm. I'm gonna guess 6 or 7 14x12 frames worth of bees. Let's get them in the long hive, see how well they do. So I'm just holding the last piece of this cluster of the swarm up in the original location. It's a really handy little trick just for catching the rest of them. Find the branch that they're on, they'll all fly off, and then stand there like a scarecrow for about 5 minutes and they will all cluster up on your hand like that. Like this, then all you need to do is do the slowest walk in the world. Go and put them in the long hive over the other side, or if you've got the box, just chuck them into the box. But it's a really good technique if you've got low hanging swarm like this. This is how you get 99% of the bees in that box: is you pretend to be a scarecrow and you just let them cluster on your hand like this. Looks loads bigger in this here. Looks like I'm holding a gigantic swarm. swarm, probably the size of like a melon or something like that. It's not that big, but it is a really, really useful little technique for getting the remainder of that swarm and just trying to make sure you gather all the bees. So I'm going to transfer this over now, take it to the long hive, drop it in, and then I'll leave it for 24 hours and I'll come back and I'll see how big that swarm is. You can feel just from the weight of this box, this is a really, really big swarm. Top quality big swarm. To get them in, If you've got a lid on, I recommend taking the lid off when you put them in just to get them all in. What you want to do, give them one big bump to get them all onto the floor, tip them upside down, and just pour them into your long hive. And there we go, it's as simple as that. That is how you get a swarm of bees out of a box onto some frames. They are going to immediately think, fantastic, this is really good, we like frames. They're going to work their way down. Then all you need to do, put your crown boards on, and it is as simple as that. You've successfully introduced a swarm into a long hive. So it might take the bees a little while just to work out what's going on here. If you need more frames, you can add more frames. You can always reduce it down at a later date. The thing with bees is they like dark areas, so they're not going to like being open in the light there. So I'm going to put a few more frames in, try and dust them down, And then I'm just going to give them a little bit of space just to get cozy into those frames. Little bit of drawn comb always helps here. Foundation is fine, drawn comb will mean that they will like it there so much more, much less risk of them absconding. So all I'm going to do at this point, I'm just going to take the crown boards off. You can easily squish bees if you do that. You can see they're all trying to get up into where it's dark at the moment. You want them going down onto the frames. So I'm just gonna brush them off that join, close them up, give them the dark space that they want, make sure that the entrance reducer is in its limited position, making sure it's not fully blocked up, and I'll leave the bees there, give them 24 hours to sort themselves out, and we'll come back and we'll see how big this swarm is. So don't be too concerned at this point about any bees that are flying around the original location, any bees that are flying around here. The chances are the queen is inside that hive somewhere. They will cluster around her. They'll think this is a great place to call home, and then they'll start to fan their Nazanov glands. They'll fan that queen's pheromone around, and all of the bees should work out how to get into that long hive. Straightforward for them. You saw it when we introduced the nuc into this long hive. It starts off as chaos, and the bees—they do just work it out. So like I said in this video, you'll see this one through all the way to the end. I'll give it 24 hours, I'll come back up, make sure that the bees haven't absconded. I'll give them another week or so, see if the queens have mated, see if they're laying eggs, and then I'll give it another couple of weeks after that, see if they're starting to draw out nice capped brood. And just to do a double check for disease, I'm only doing the double check for disease if it isn't one of my queens. I'll hold my hands up, if it's one of my queens marked blue, it is almost certainly going to be one of my bees from this apiary here. I'll do a little bit of a check round as well, see if I can find the colony that swarmed, and then that way we definitely know which colony it is. So I'll fast forward 24 hours, I'll come back, you can see all of the bees in the long hive. So the first thing to note is really positive activity at the entrance. There's bees going in, there's bees going out. Whatever happens, there's a few bees in here. Hopefully the whole swarm stayed in here. But whenever you put a swarm in a box, if you're seeing this kind of activity, chances are we're going to open it up and find a really nice-sized colony in here. It's 5 days since I put this swarm into the long hive. I'm going to go in there, see if they've settled down, see if I can find the queen, see if she's mated, see if there's any eggs, take it from there. So here we go, we've got a swarm in the long hive, and I know it doesn't look that big in here, but it's because it's about 3 or 4 frames on a 14 by 12, that equates to about 6 frames on a national deep. So it's a pretty average-sized swarm in comparison to the other ones that I've been getting at this time of year, but the main thing is we've got some bees and they're in the long hive. I'm going to take some frames out now and see what we've got. So I've been pretty much wrong for every single swarm video this year. I thought this was going to be a blue-marked 2020 queen, One of my own that I hadn't clipped, and it turns out that it's a swarm with a virgin in it. Now whether that's a cast swarm or a prime swarm, I don't know. I've had a look around and I can't find any big prime swarms sitting underneath any of my colonies here with the clipped queen in, indicating that this might be a cast swarm. So I'm back to the drawing board with this one. It could well just be a feral swarm with a virgin in. What I do know is that the queen in this hive at the moment is definitely not mated, or at least she's not mature enough to lay eggs. She may have gone out, got mated, and is just waiting to come in to lay, but at the moment there's no eggs. They're drawing out that foundation to give the queen somewhere to lay, but at the moment definitely no sign of any eggs. So the good thing is the swarm has stayed put though, it's not absconded. I've seen the queen, so all we need to do now is play the waiting game, give it another couple of weeks, and then hopefully we'll come back, hopefully see some eggs Even better than that, we'll see some capped brood, and then we can just let this colony expand. So I'll fast forward a couple of weeks. Stay tuned to the end of this video and see how well the queen gets mated, if the brood is diseased, and just how big this colony might become. Right, so it's about seven days later. We're going to go back in, see if we can find the queen, see if we can see some eggs. Hopefully, see the colony starting to expand. So compared to last time, there is a little bit of growth. But that's not really due to the fact that the colony has expanded in any way. It's more that they've just become a little bit more accustomed to those frames there. So covering still three or four frames of brood. We'll get inside now and we'll see what the bees are doing in the hide hives long hive. So I do seem to get this wrong every single time with swarms, and it just goes to show you you just can't tell even if the swarm is in your apiary what is going on with the actual swarm. So if You can see the queen is just over here, and I was adamant that this was going to be a mated queen, one of my own, because they were a light bee, they were in my apiary. But I've gone through all of my colonies, and again, none of them have swarmed. So someone around here must be keeping quite light bees as well, uh, because there is a really good size, very light queen there, and she seems a lot less timid than last time as Well, so good to see the queen knocking around. You can see her there, lovely looking queen. And then you can see on the frames as well that the bees are starting to draw out the foundation really, really nicely. So they've very much accepted the long hive as their home now. The queen is being taken care of by all of those bees. I'm going to get in for a closer look, see if I can see some eggs. I'm going to guess we're going to find eggs, if not today, then definitely in the near future because of how long that queen's abdomen is. Really good size. You can see it from the angle there. I'm going to guess we're going to find some eggs. So looking really good when you see frames like this fully laid up with eggs and then the queen's got an elongated abdomen. Chances are she is mated. Obviously, until these eggs turn into larvae and then they're capped over as worker brood. You can't be 100% sure, but 9 times out of 10, when you see that, the colony is in good shape and you've got a mated queen. So that's it for the video. We've successfully added a swarm into our long hive, and we've checked, we're almost certain that that queen is mated. I'm not going to follow the video on any further than this because I want to follow on to the next video in the series. So if you enjoy this content, if you're enjoying this series, please hit the subscribe button now, because the next video that I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to balance a big colony over there and a very small colony over here. It's a really simple, easy manipulation, and that's what we're going to do in our next video. So I hope you enjoyed this one. Definitely have a go with this if you've bought yourself a long hive. They are perfect for adding swarms into. Just chuck them in like that, do your best to get the queen in there, Follow the steps, check for eggs. Ideally, you want to see capped worker brood so you can analyze the disease risk. But the fact that the swarm is in this apiary anyway, I'm just transporting it into the long hive. So I hope you enjoyed that video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
