First Swarm

Last week we got our first swarm for this year - and it was right next to our apiary; only.... 20 feet up!

Heres how we went about this one. I set up 3 medium boxes about 10 feet from the swarm..which was also about 10 feet from the other hives. Because of the location of this swarm I couldn't really get up there and safely cut the branch and ease it down. Even on top of the ladder I was still nowhere near where I needed to be. Time to try out our new swarm bucket. Its just a 5 gal bucket affixed to two 5 foot segments of pvc pipe joined with a coupling. I like the idea of this allot but the bucket wasn't very secure which made maneurving it near the swarm a little nerve racking. In addition to the bucket we also had to use a rope to swing over the branch and give us the leverage we needed to shake the swarm. Our goal at first was to do it in one clean jerking motion but instead it took us five attempts to get the majority of the swarm into a bucket and placed into the hive. Every time I got rain'd on... not by softly cudly water.. but instead by my cute little bee friends!

On the 2nd attempt I was lucky enough to find the queen - and capture the moment on VIDEO! That was a first for me and altought looking at the video it looks planned I sware it was not. For the first few rainy days I had the top of the hive open to encourage the bees I missed to come in, then I tried closing the top off but they did not like that. They are still making some strange digging/scrating noise like they are trying to get out and until yesterday the were not really using the bottom entrance. Before we left yesterday for Mothers-day events we took two of the three boxes off and left it as one.. 98% of the bees were in the top one all to the left side. This morning I checked on them and they were still making the sound, but also using the bottom entrance like the other hives normally do.  The last thing I noticed today was that the hive on the far right was VERY loud and had lots of action out front...no bearding...just lots flying in front very noisey. We'll see what happens next!