Capturing a Swarm

The old hives are gone.

I burned our old, unused hives last week in preparation for three new nuc (for nucleus) boxes this afternoon.  Brian Umstead offered to replace my old hives because of our setting, and I welcomed the opportunity.

I've researched native pollinators and done workshops on building habitats, but I'm relatively new to honeybees.  In 2005, one of my ninth graders, almost apologetically, asked if he could build an apiary for his project even though there was no control, or independent or dependent variables.  I said, "Of course." and we talked about mentors and training classes with local beekeeping groups.  


After I left to teach at Virginia Tech, he and other students convinced the principal and the school system administrators to keep hives on the roof of the school.  I regularly use this as an example of the importance of student autonomy in project-based learning.  But beyond that, and a few lessons in harvesting honey from Steve Martin at ChurchView Farm, I don't have much  experience with honeybees.

Above:  Brian captures the swarm with sugar water.

Below:  Luring the remaining bees into the hive in the new 

location.

So just as we were finishing, Brian suggested trying to capture a swarm and installing a larger hive.   I grabbed one of the taller ladders and we drove over to Foxwalk Farm.  Brian put on a suit and climbed up with a sugar-water soaked comb to lure the bees from a cedar tree.  A couple hundred climbed on, and I swapped the comb with a fresh one.  But after a short while, it became clear that to get the swarm to come as a whole, we'd need to remove the whole end of the branch they were swarming.  I did the cutting, so I only caught some of the events on video.

We clipped the branches around the swarm and stuffed them all into a box for traveling back to our farm.  The challenge then became removing them from the branch. Eventually, we had to just knock them off, then help those inside the hive attract the rest inside.

We're concerned that we might not have much of a Black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) bloom this year, but we have an abundance of early and late blooming raspberries, and then Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) that will hopefully keep them interested in staying.

In case you're wondering, the louder, constant hum you here in the background is not the hives, it's Diane mowing on the bigger tractor.