Capturing a Swarm

My friend, Keith, got two nucs of bees last Sunday, just like I did. Last night I got a "911" text message from him with only one word: "swarm!" We can only speculate that one of the frames in one of the nucs had a queen cell that he missed during the transfer. I drove down to his farm in Merriweather county and saw what he was talking about.

They were on a branch about 10 feet from his two other hives. The picture above was taken after we had cut the branch down.

Luckily, I had an old 10-frame hive body with some drawn comb in it (foreground) that we could shake them into. They really did *not* want to leave that branch, so I used a bee brush to "sweep" most of them off.We got most of them off of the branch but there was still a large cluster left on the ground.

I had no idea where the queen was, so I decided to just scoop them up with my hands.

It was only 45 degrees outside at the time so they hardly moved during them move. I dropped them in the center of the frames, sealed up the hive and drove them back to Decatur. They make a nice addition to the bee yard.

Tuesday is supposed to be warm enough to check on them, so stay tuned...