Posted: 3/27/2023 9:50:08 AM EDT
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So it’s getting closer to time for bees to swarm and I’m looking for ideas on how to catch my swarms, or at least how to keep from having to cut them out of trees. I’ve seen and heard of people using t-posts and hanging black conduit upside down to attract swarming bees. Anyone use this or another method? If so, do you any type of pheromones or attractants to lure them to the conduit? |
This guy seems to have a decent handle on it.   If I Hadn't Caught It On Camera You Wouldn't Have Believed Me Basically find the queen and relocate. They won't hang around where a queen is not. |
| This is my 2nd year with bees so I am far from an expert so take this for what it’s worth. The lady who has been mentoring me uses swarm traps with varying degrees of success. I am trying this year for the first time so I don’t have much experience. I used an empty deep hive box that I have and made lids and a bottom for it. You then drill an entrance hole and put a couple empty frames inside it along with lemongrass oil as an attractant. If you don’t have bee stuff this is probably not much help but you can look them up online and people have all kinds of different variations. It is not long til bees will be starting to swarm around here so hopefully they work. |
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Quoted: This guy seems to have a decent handle on it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgOYLDf5Wv8Basically find the queen and relocate. They won't hang around where a queen is not. That was very cool. My Dad would do stuff like that and never get stung. The guy in the video only got stung twice. I would have been a swollen corpse by the time the video was over. |
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Catching your own swarms is very hit and miss. Much better to monitor your hives and split them ahead of time. My DW is the beekeeper in the family. After we got married we moved 25 of her hives up here from FL in late March. Beekeeping here is very different from FL. With the long days and abundance of nectar the hive populations just exploded. We were chasing swarms all over. I put a five gallon bucket on the end of long aluminum snow roof rake handle that had 4 6' sections. I would jam the bucket into the swarm and hope the queen fell in. We caught a few that way. We do usually put out a hive body like one of the above posters mentioned. We've caught a few swarms like that over the years. |
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Quoted: I actually had a swarm of bees get into my goddamned wall yesterday. I went out to see what was going on. Got stung on the shoulder. Got a beekeeper coming out today to try and coax em out of the wall. I would love to be able to get swarms out of peoples walls and such. |
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Quoted: @Camaroman Removal was successful. Had to cut into my first floor ceiling to get em out. Guy had a FLIR imager that he used to find out where they were. Pretty neat. https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/310196/IMG_2509-2814550.jpg I've heard of thermal imagery being used for that, neat stuff. I had a swarm in the utility room of a house I was renting one time, guess they came in around the dryer vent opening. I had seen some hives at a house down the road so I went and knocked on the door. The old guy came and helped me remove them. There were thousands of them but they were surprisingly docile, I only got stung once and I had no proper gear to use aside from a hood the guy let me use. Last time I helped retrieve a swarm was for a woman I knew that had just started beekeeping. We placed a box under the swarm, I got up on a ladder and cut the limb they were on letting them fall into the box. I guess we got lucky and the queen was with them so they stayed with her. I didn't get stung at all that time, I did have one bee that got in my pants somehow though. I just excused myself to the garage for a minute to evict it, my friend and her daughters couldn't believe I was so calm about it. Honey bees don't bother me, if it had been a wasp or a hornet I would have embarrassed them all. |
| When bees are swarming they are usually quite docile. The absolute key is to find the queen. Look for the largest cluster of bees or for the direction all the bees are going because it will be toward her. Put her in a bee case and put that in a box with an opening, they will stream toward her |
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OP, there is a dedicated beekeeping thread here in Homestead. It's tacked at the top of the forum. You are welcome there to get information any time. Yes, there are a number of ways to capture swarms, and some folks are highly skilled at it. I generally took a styrofoam box with a lid, cut a couple of holes in it, and hung it in a tree near the swarm. I put a piece of old wax in there (dark wax is best, according to my bee mentors, but I don't know if that's true) and about two or three small drops of lemongrass on a piece of wood or stick or something. It needs to be high-quality essential oil. Not something cheap because the bees will know if the oil has been cut with some other substance and won't be attracted. The "people" who decide where they're going to go are actually the worker bees. The queen does what they say. The lemongrass oil evidently attracts the worker bees, and they then bring the queen to the new box. Lot of folks use swarm traps of one kind or another. I will link this thread in the beekeeping thread and get some beekeepers in here to offer suggestions. My knowledge is a few years old now, even though that original thread was mine. I now help a friend with his bees, and gave him all my equipment. I just did not have time to tend them, and they declined. Lot of beekeepers here on the forum though, and you will get help with just about anything.  ETA: Don't use too much lemongrass oil. More is not better. |
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What kitties said about the lemongrass oil. If you can smell it, it's probably too much. Just old drawn comb frames in the swarm trap is fine. A friend of mine uses burlap as a inner cover, and the bees propolize it. When it's full, he puts a piece of it above the trap entrance. |
| I had a swarm show up in a tree right outside the back door yesterday. I called a local bee keeper and he came right away to get them. He got up there with a portable bee hive and shook the branch to get the majority of bees intot it. He then used a hand brush to sweep the rest into the container. Bees are generally pretty calm and don't sting when they are swarmed like that. I stood pretty close to make sure he didn't fall off the ladder and none of the bees came close to me. |