Category: All About Bees

Catching swarms is all about helping the wild bee populations and getting free bees. By definition, a swarm caught in early spring has survived the winter months and are adapted well to surviving the local environment. Wild bees typically display desirable traits such as mite resistance and cold tolerance. However sometimes this comes at the potential cost of low honey productivity or more aggressive behavior. Regardless of their behavior, giving wild bees a safe home is great for the local bee population and over time could improve your bee yard genetics.

A swarm catcher is simply a small box that can be hoisted up into a tree and lowered down when the bees move in. Positioning of the swarm trap is critical as well as baiting the box. Timing is also critical. In Denver, swarms usually begin when the nectar flow begins. This changes from year to year, but is usually the first nice week of May.

I will typically look for wild bee colonies in the area before choosing a location for my swarm box. If you find a local wild colony then typically it is a good idea to place your swarm trap up in a tree roughly 100 yards away. Even better if the tree faces an open field and water is nearby.

The swarm trap itself is simply two horticultural paper pulp pots wired together. Make sure to close up the drain holes and provide only one hole as the entrance.
I have had great success with this style of trap. There are tons of different swarm trap designs that you can use.

You will also want to bait the inside of the swarm trap with both a scent and some old honey comb. Any old honey comb will do just fine. The best comb for swarm traps is dirty smelly and old. Then I usually use about three drops of lemon grass oil. Make sure to reapply the lemon grass oil each week or so. If you can smell the lemon grass oil the bees can most certainly smell it.

If you are lucky a swarm will find your trap and make it their temporary home. You need to make sure and move the swarm to a permanent hive immediately. Otherwise the swarm could decide to leave or the hive could begin to build comb.

Installing the hive is as simple as opening the swarm catcher and dumping the colony into a hive body.

In my opinion this is one of the coolest things that bees do. Partially because a swarm is a highly visible and spectacular display of bee behavior. But mostly because free bees are awesome. Basically, swarming is where the queen bee leaves the colony and takes about half of the population with her. The queen flies away with half the colony and goes out into the world to find a new home.

Swarming is how a honey bee colony reproduces itself. Typically in the spring the queen bee will begin to dramatically increase the number of eggs laid. the number of eggs laid is directly correlated to the increase in resources being brought in from the outside world by the forager bees. Eventually the number of bees in the hive becomes so abundant that the colony begins the process of swarming. The genetics of the bee colony and the number of available resources will determine how likely a colony is to swarm.

Inside the hive the process of swarming begins with the formation of a new queen bee. The worker bees begin to create swarm cells where a new queen bee will be raised. Swarm cells are usually on the bottom of a brood frame pointing downward. These cells in the picture are actually emergency queen cells. Deep inside the larger queen cells are larva which are being fed an exclusive diet of royal jelly.

Eventually the swarm cells will become capped which is a sign that the colony is very close to swarming. Other signs as well will indicate that a colony is thinking about swarming. In the spring you will also see a huge increase in the number of drone cells. The drones are required to fertilize the new queen so we need plenty of them around.

Then eventually the day comes where the original queen will leave the hive. For several days the nurse bees have been restricting the diet of the queen and running her around the hive. The queen must be loose body mass for her upcoming flight. Usually the same day that the new queen will hatch the original queen leaves the hive. The queen will fly out and approximately half of the hive will leave and follow her on the journey.

The queen lands so that the colony can rest for a short period of time. The group of bees that left with the queen will surround her and form a huge scary looking ball of bees. A hanging swarm looks scary and intimidating but in reality they are very unlikely to sting and just need a place to organize. It is in this condition that the bees can be transported and moved into a new hive.

While hanging from a high tree branch or small shrub there are hundreds of scout bees looking for a new home. It can take hours or sometimes days for the scout bees and the colony to agree on a new home. It is during this period of transition where a bee keeper can quickly swoop in and give these bees a new home. The swarm is either shaken into a box or the tree branch can be cut. The bees are transported back to the bee yard in a box and the colony can be introduced into a new hive body.

For a bee colony, swarming is an incredibly dangerous and counter-intuitive behavior. In the spring the colony is a safe and productive environment. Hundreds of bees are hatching every day and resources are pouring in. The hive is functioning at it’s best and only getting more productive. Then suddenly the queen decides to leave and flies into the big dangerous outside world. Putting herself and the original colony in potential jeopardy. But this behavior is required for the genetic distribution of the species. Just as plants devise methods of dispersing seeds long distances, the honey bee evolved behavior to spread their genetics as well.