Catching a Swarm

I used up the last of my beeswax this week, making more dipped candles for the Cheshire Union, but I'm planning to harvest my honey and wax within the next few weeks, so that should replenish my stocks (I know I'm contrary to what most beekeepers do, but that's when I have the most time, so that's when I harvest). I also generally supplement my wax with wax from other local beekeepers in the area as well. However, there a certain gratification that comes from making candles out of one's own beeswax, especially when it comes from a swarm you caught and raised yourself.

I caught a swarm of bees in 2006. It was an unusually cold day in May and my family and I were next door at my grandmother's doing the spring yard work. My mother was sawing a dead branch off one of the trees and when it came down, it was crawling with countless honeybees, (needless to say, my mother hightailed it away from the tree as fast as she could.)

I'd been planning to order a swarm of bees for quite some time, but hadn't had the time to build a beebox, and since it had gotten so late in the year, I knew I'd have to wait until the following year. Or so I thought. Knowing I'd been interested in starting beekeeping, my mother told me about the bee encrusted branch. I was ecstatic.

It was close to nightfall, so I rushed home and spent the rest of the daylight building a beebox out of some pieces of scrap lumber. It wasn't pretty, but I didn't have time to do it as properly as I would have liked. There weren't any honey frames in it, and my queen excluder was just a piece of thin wood with some haphazard holes drilled through it, but I figured they make their nests in hollow trees when they're in the wild, so my box would just be like square, hollow tree. While I was doing that, Mom had sawed off the pieces of the fallen branch, so all that remained was a chunk of wood covered by a swarm of bees.

When darkness had completely fallen, I put on some heavy clothes and tucked my hair up under some handkerchiefs tied tightly around my head, as I didn't have a bee suit at that point either. Mom and I loaded the beebox into the back of the pickup truck and we drove back to the fallen limb. I carefully lifted the beecovered chunk of wood into the box, hoping I had the queen. It was probably one of most nerve-wracking moments of my life as I stood there holding a wooden box that I could feel the bees buzzing inside. I think my heart was racing faster than their wings were beating.

We drove the truck (slowly so as not to agitate the bees) up to the spot where I'd chosen to put the hive, far away from the house and the cows. Then we pulled the box off the truck and set it on the ground. It was even more of an adrenaline rush because the bees were louder from having bounced across the field in the back of the truck. One of them started flying out of the box and we quickly decided it was time to leave, as the lights of the truck were starting to wake them up.

There were still a couple hundred bees lying in the lawn when we drove back down. They'd fallen off the wood when I put it in the box. I wasn't sure if they'd find their way to the hive or not, so I left Mom's big popcorn kettle next to them with a lure, hoping they'd crawl inside. Unfortunately by the next morning, they weren't crawling inside, they were starting to build beeswax on the outside of the kettle. So I waited until nightfall, then Mom and I went back up the kettle.

We took a shovel, dug up the patch of grass the bees were sitting on, and plopped it into the kettle, slammed on the lid and took it up to the woods. I didn’t dare try to open the top of the kettle for fear of getting stung to death, so I tossed (literally) the kettle next to the hive and ran like crazy. The next day the bees had left the kettle and joined the rest of their colony in the hive.

Since my beebox was basically like a hollow tree, the colony built all their own honeycombs. That meant my bees took a few years to move into the upper level of the hive, so I didn’t have anything to harvest the first two years. The upside is that they had enough honey for themselves so I never have to feed them in the winter. 

So, if you ever find a wild swarm, that’s one way to catch it.