Laurence Edwards captures a honeybee swarm from a tree using a nuc box. He shows how to shake bees into the box, assess the queen's presence by whether they settle, and use foundation frames to keep them calm. Swarms are gentle but he recommends protective gear for new beekeepers.
I'm at the apiary where the cows have absolutely battered all of the fences, and I found a very little swarm hanging in the tree. Originally I thought it was potentially a colony that's absconded where the cows have gone in and bashed over all of these colonies, but they didn't actually make a huge amount of damage in there. So what's happened here is probably a colony's just swarmed and I've missed it. In this video, I'm going to show you how to get this colony into a box. This is like low-hanging fruit. I'm just going to lift up a nuc box, shake the bees in, Stick a lid on, place it back into the apiary. So all I've got here is a BS Honeybees nuc, and I've got 6 frames of drawn comb in there. Now there's a number of ways of doing this. One, that you can just cut the branches off, but there's 3 branches there that they're all intertwined around, so it's quite difficult to cut the branches in this situation if it's anything more than one branch. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to give them a really good shake and then put the nuc on the ground. Easiest way of doing it. First thing I'm going to do though is I'm going to remove some of the frames from the nuc So it means that I can lift the box up and kind of get most of the bees around it. Get them to a point like this, and then you just want to give them one really good shake and they should all drop in. So there we go. That's how you catch a swarm. Swarms are very gentle. They generally don't sting you, so there's no need for equipment. But definitely use equipment if you're not used to it and you're not sure what the temperament of that swarm is going to be like. All I'm going to do now is put this on the floor because I've just noticed that there's a big splodge of bees actually on the floor as well. Put the frames back in, and then that's the swarm complete. So you can see the bees there, the ones that were on the floor. Didn't realize there were actually a little cluster on the floor as well. Must have fallen from that main cluster overnight. You can see that they're just getting back up into that colony now. They will cluster up in there, all of the bees, every single one. Not gonna try and find the queen though. No point in doing that. There's either a queen in there or there isn't a queen in there. If I can get all of the bees into the box, then if there's a queen in there, she's in the box, and if there's no queen, then she's not in the box. The bees will tell me over a number of days whether there is a queen in there or not. So you always end up with a few little stragglers where there's pheromone left on the branch like that. I'll leave it to the very end, break off that branch, and I will just chuck those in. You can see though from the leaves there that that swarm had actually been there for a long time, definitely over 24 hours, because what you can see there is the beginning of a wax Formation on those leaves. Swarms don't start to draw wax very quickly, definitely not within the kind of first 12 to 24 hours. They'd started to draw it there. The weather's not been very good either, so I suspect they've probably been there for like 2 or 3 days, and they are a little bit flighty as well for a swarm. So that kind of explains why they weren't the most gentle swarm. Didn't get stung, but just a little bit more flighty than normal. So as the bees start going in, you can just put your frames of foundation in. Frames of drawn comb, whatever you want. That will really help attract the bees in because it gives them like a nice dark space to go and cluster up around. And then it's just a matter of waiting for all of these remaining bees to work their way up. They always will. And then we'll take all of these bees off to their new home. So there we go, that's another swarm caught. I've only had about 5 or 6 this year, but I've turned down so many calls and been sending people out to get them because I really don't have the time to be going out swarm catching to to the extent of the amount of swarms that have been out there this year. That was a very easy one though. I'm going to plop that back into this apiary here. They don't need to go to a new apiary because they're not going to have orientated to that branch of that tree. They can go anywhere and they will reorientate once the weather gets a bit better. If you don't want to go out catching swarms and you want the swarms to come to you, check out this video on how to set up swarm traps.
