Our first swarm collection

Last Thursday John and I rescued a small swarm of bees a friend of his had spotted in a neighbor’s yard. I say rescued because their ranks appeared decimated by the cold and rain. We found them on the side of an awning over a back porch in two small clusters. The smallest had already succumbed completely to the cold (or so we thought…), but the other (about the size of two softballs) showed some movement and life.

With the help of a timely coincidence – namely John’s wife running into the president of a local beekeeping club who just happened to have a bee vacuum in her car – we collected the swarm with speed and ease. A bee vac is a low powered vacuum designed to suck up bees. This one had been rigged to attach to the top of a small bucket to deposit the bees in and ran off of a car battery jump starter kit. The bees were so chilly that they put up only minimal resistance and only two or three took flight.

And all of this added up to one simple truth: we could not have asked for better circumstances in which two neophyte beekeepers collected their first swarm. We didn’t wear any protective equipment except what we already had on to combat the chilly weather. The neighbors that spotted the hive, friends of John’s from his church and Bible study group, were really excited to see the show and Beth, the renter of the house that harbored the six-legged squatters, was really happy to see them rescued.

The bees have a long trip ahead of them. Assuming the queen is still alive, she’ll need to rebuild a very damaged population – and she’ll have to wait until Saturday to start. While I have most of the top bar hive that we were planning on using to rear captured swarms put together, I still have a bit more to go and won’t have it ready till this weekend. The good news is this: John transferred the swarm from the bee vac bucket to one of the nuc boxes that we had leftover from our bees last year last night and, to paraphrase for gentler ears, they were ticked. However, remember my “or so we thought…” comment? We had sucked up most of the cluster that appeared dead, yet John found no dead bees – not a single one – in the bucket when he made the transfer. Our suspicion is that these bees were so cold they were near death, but not quite there. Once they warmed up they found life again. My hope is that this means the bees still have the vigor to stage a comeback. My fear is that we’ll have another batch of Sicilians on our hands.

Only time will tell!

Posted by Bob Nelson