Never a dull moment…. What’s buzzing?

Are you busy In half an hour?
A simple phone call on a Sunday afternoon.

There’s a swarm along the road!

We got our bee jackets and a giant straw bee catcher.

The address was literally five minutes from our own house.

There in a tree, a huge clump of bees and thousands in the air.

The bees were higher than swarms we’ve seen so far. (There have been three this week so far.)

So a little ingenuity was called for. After a few minutes with tape, and the pole of a long arm loper we were ready.

The bees were not.

They’d gone!

On further inspection the swarm had shifted and was now plastered all over another tree.

Albeit less far from the ground, the new location presented other challenges.

Rather than a classic yogi bear style clump of bees hanging in a tree, the splattered effect of this swarm was going to make it very hard to collect.

As you can see there were four bee hives below the swarm. They hadn’t travelled far.

More tape and ingenuity later a collection method was devised. We baited the hive catcher with a special scent. A home made tincture of dead queen bees that we concocted last week.

It seemed to be working but slowly. So the next action was to help the bees into the basket.

Does my bum look big in this?

(Technically that was me taking the photo! Whilst holding the ladder!)

At this point it was raining bees, I was covered in bees, it was bee soup!

We swept the bees in in large numbers, around four kilos at this point.

The aim is to transfer the queen into a container. When the bees pick up her scent they will follow. The bees that have found her turn their tails towards the outside of the container and use their wings to fan the scent towards the rest of the swarm. The others then transfer into one large location.

The swarm basket is left to allow stray bees to join the colony again.

After this we transferred the bees into a hive box. They should settle in nicely!

What a crazy Sunday!