A swarm of honey bees on a wooden beehive. Stock photo.
By Ginny Cheek, Lafayette County Master Gardener
Wow! Some people’s idea of excitement can be a bit…unusual. For me, the excitement happened this past weekend. As we know, spring is here, and I happened to be in South Louisiana with my daughters when a phone call from a frantic neighbor came in. Seems the neighbors were mowing on a hillside around a magnolia tree and spotted a swarm of bees. They knew my daughters were fairly new (third year) beekeepers and called to see what should be done.
My daughter in turn called a professional beekeeper friend of hers to ask him about removing the swarm. We were all excited, thinking we were going to get to watch a real live swarm capture happen. Imagine our surprise when the beekeeper said “you’ve described a reproductive swarm with probably an older queen. Go capture it” We stood there like deer in the headlights staring at one another. Us? Go capture a swarm of bees?
After much cussing and discussing, we all three suited up and took our bee equipment to the neighbor’s house. Because the swarm was in a tree on a rather steep hillside, we had to finagle a bit to get the brood box level. Then, according to the instructions of the professional beekeeper, we shook the branch where the swarm was, and the bees just plopped into the brood box underneath. After a minute or so, we shook the branch again. How to know if we got the queen as well? Did we get all the bees? Do we take the branch as well? How many more times do we shake the tree branch? Did you step on any bees?
After several more shakes of the magnolia branch, we finally decided we had gotten all or most of the bees and hoped we had gotten the queen. When my daughter picked up the frames she had used to level the brood box, there was the queen, surrounded by her entourage. We put her all the way inside the brood box, closed it up, and set it in its permanent place. As of Monday, the bees were quite content in their new home. Woo hoo! We did it! And nobody even got stung in the process! Talk about excitement!
