I was informed of a swarm through an online neighborhood messaging. We went over and quickly began work removing the bees. In hindsight the bees were much to high up for us to safely catch. In the end we did manage to catch the swarm but I would never do that again. I should be more careful.
Ultimately because of the bees being just out reach, tucked tightly in the tree borough, and not on a “shakable” branch, I decided to mount a NUC box up in the tree. The bees promptly marched into the box in about 20 minutes.
I installed kept the colony locked up until the next morning. During the morning hours when the temperatures were low around 55, I transferred the frames into the plastic hive. The plastic hive has queen excluders on the entrance, so I made sure the workers could travel but the queen would remain. The chance of leaving is small, the plastic hive has fully drawn out old brood frames with several full resource frames from last years dead out.
The owner of the property called be back the next day and asked if I would come back by to retrieve a few bees which were lost of the swarm. It is typical for bees to become lost during a swarm and not make it into the “catch”. Normally the bees will either go back to the original hive, join another hive or die off. I ran back over with a homemade bee-vac and gently removed them from the kids tree house. We will add these bees to a weak hive during the dark hours of night.
