August, 2009
It was a textbook swarm retrieval. I received a call around 6pm from a lady about a very large swarm of bees that had landed in a tree about 10 minutes earlier. When my husband Steve got home from work about 6:30, I was furiously loading bee equipment into our pickup. We arrived at the location a little after 7. The bees were still there, clustered on a branch about 6 feet off the ground. Steve placed the empty hive under the bees, and with one quick shake of the branch, the cluster was dislodged, most of them falling into hive. By 9pm, all the bees had moved inside, so we closed up the hive and took it home. Steve unloaded the from from the truck, put it in its new location, and slid the cover a bit to give them ventilation. All in all, it was a pretty uneventful retrieval, until the end when two bees crawled inside Steve's shirt and stung him. He was doing quite a dance to get his shirt off.
The next morning I removed the hive from its location, placing a screened bottom board in its place. I then set the hive back in place, gave them a gallon of syrup, and put on the top cover. I had not smoked the bees so they were a little unhappy. Tried to take some pictures, but they did not want me within 50 feet of the hive.
The hive is comprised of four 8 frame medium supers. The two bottom boxes have frames, the top two do not as they are just there to cover the feeder. For the move, a top cover was used for the bottom and a migratory cover for the top. A medium sized super is 20" x 6.5". Using those dimensions we calculated the swarm to be about 13.5" x 13.5 x13.5".
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May 2010
The One that Got Away
Sunday afternoon I got a call from Steve's beer making buddy's wife. Mary Jo said a swarm of bees had settled in their backyard. I said I'd be right over. Steve couldn't go, he was in the middle of making some beer. I get there to find one very large swarm about 15 feet off the ground in their globe willow tree. Doug threw a rope around the end of the branch, we set up a ladder with a box on top under the swarm. Doug and I suited up, Mary Jo and the kids moved off to a safe distance, I climbed up the ladder to steady the box, then Doug hanked the rope. Most of the bees landed in the box, which Doug helped get off the ladder. There were a lot of bees flying in the air, so we all moved inside to wait for things to calm down. Went out for a look a bit later and the bees were going in the box. Told them I'd be back at dusk the retreive the box and the bees.
Steve went with me to pick up the bees. There were still a few bees flying around, so of course Steve and Doug passed the time trying a bottle of Doug's latest brew. We then gathered up our new bees, headed home and hived them; okay, Steve hived them. Steve had on a pair of jeans with both the knees out. He got sting three times on one leg and once on the other, (I had offered him use of my full bee suit, he turned it down). The stings didn't swell, they didn't itch (some people have all the luck).
Get home the next afternoon and they were gone. They had swarmed again a couple hours earlier. Took a tour around the area looking for them, to no avail. Guess that's what I get for counting my honey before it's jarred.
