The one in the tree was medium sized, about like the one we captured this morning. The other one made me take pause. It was HUGE compared to all the rest.
To capture the one at the apartment we borrowed a ladder from a resident, and a hand clipper. That made it easy to climb the ladder and clip off the branch, dropping the entire swarm and branch into the container. Very few bees even noticed the transition!
The one in the parking lot was a bit more tricky. The size allowed the swarm to stretch across 3 branches of the shrub. Fortunately I clipped each of the three branches off and the swarm still hung in the air as if suspended by a thread. Apparently the leaves around it were intertwined enough to hold it up. Slowly breaking it loose spread a few bees into the air but not that many really. Into the bucket it went, branches and all.
Back at home we decided to place the smaller swarm collected tonight into the hive that has the first and overall smallest colony. With the top bar hives it was fairly easy to do this by placing a colony at each end. They will grow towards each other as they expand. The large swarm went into our last hive that is now placed into the horse arena that we don't use for riding.
We'd like to offer a thank you to everyone that called in about the swarms. Within a week we managed to fill 3 hives, one with 2 colonies! It was also a pleasant surprise to find so many nice people that truly care about the bees, nature, and farmers.
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| Can you find the swarm in the bush? This was right in the center of a public parking lot! |
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| Here is a closeup! Wow there is a lot of bees! bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz |
And here is a quick video of "bunches of bees!" as Kaelyn says...
Wowzers you've been busy! Congrats!!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, that is a lot of bees!
ReplyDelete