Keeping honey bee hives means you will likely encounter swarms, honeybees that split off from a mother colony. A natural reproduction process, swarming can happen to any beekeeper, so you should be prepared when it occurs. It is a sight to behold when the swarm is in full flight. The season of swarms is typically in April and May here in the Mid-Atlantic, when bees are building up quickly from all the available nectar. Swarms can appear suddenly and you have to be prepared to move them within a few hours or they will start to move on to another area. At the end of this post, I will show you a step by step of a swarm forming with me installing them into a new hive.   

This swarm has clustered on a low branch of an arborvitae tree

Having hives on my property, in the spring, I am always attuned to listening for the dull roar of a swarm building up and flying away. Humming bees can be heard from about 100 feet away and they come out in an awe-inspiring wave that bursts from the hive.

 

Extra Equipment On Hand

I have three hives and as an experienced beekeeper I always have additional hive equipment on hand when a swarm appears. This is your opportunity to increase your bee population free of charge! The problem is catching the swarm as it can be quite tricky, especially if it is over 10 feet off the ground.

Cost

Honey bee startup colonies are expensive to buy — roughly $225 a pop — so when a swarm emerges from a newly installed hive or an established one,  you see your honey harvest evaporate into thin air. The hive will decamp, taking at least a third to one half of the population along with a newly produced queen and move elsewhere, and your chances of getting a honey harvest evaporate because a major part of the hive has left. The remaining hive with the old queen usually doesn’t retain enough worker bees to create a good honey harvest. The swarming honeybees leave their home carrying as much honey as they can hold and are immediately ready to start building comb in their new home.

Go Low

The swarm may settle low enough to capture, but more likely than not, they fly far away to a tree 60 feet high with no chance of hiving them up for a new colony. Their chances of surviving in the wild are around 20%. The remaining bees are a much smaller population and have little chance of producing excess honey for harvest in the current year, but have a good chance of surviving the winter and producing a honey harvest next year.

The Key is to Capture the Queen

Once I had a swarm land on a nearby tree and I simply climbed a ladder and lopped the branch off and brought it down the ladder with all the bees attached and knocked them into the hive box. The key is to get the queen into the hive box and all the workers will automatically follow. The honeybees have imprinted her pheromones and will follow here wherever she goes.

Queen Cups

Before the swarm leaves the original hive, the queen lays eggs into queen cups, or larger cells that can accommodate the larger growing queen larvae. After the swarm leaves with the old queen, the new queens will emerge from the queen cups and if there are several that emerge, they will fight to the death, until the stronger one and usually the first one to emerge, is victorious.

Way Station Cluster

Queens are too heavy to fly long distances, so the swarm usually will form on a nearby structure or tree branch with the queen in the center, and scout bees will start to look for new homes. They cluster in the chosen spot for a few hours or a few days, until the scout bees determine where the final nest site will be. Since I am on the swarm contact list for my area, I get many frantic calls from concerned homeowners who have a swarm land on a nearby shrub, tree, or other structure. I usually ask them to send a picture of the swarm and give me a brief description of how accessible it will be before committing to capture it. But I have hived up some good swarms from homeowners who are just glad to get rid of them!

Step By Step Hiving a Swarm

My most recent swarm was the largest swarm I have ever encountered. I think there were at least 10,000 bees in the cluster and they initially formed in two different clusters and then coalesced into one.

The first video is of the swarm just forming. the second one shows the swarm starting to settle in a tree. The third one shows that the swarm split into two places on the same tree. The fourth one, the two swarms coalesced into one on the lower branch and I cut the entire branch that they formed on. The swarm weighed over 30 pounds! I took the entire branch over to their new home and shook them in. The last video is 5 hours later where they are settling into their new home. I have a new hive!

Video of swarm just forming:

 

Afterwards

Once the hive settles in, the virgin queen will make her mating flights where she will mate with up to 12-15 male drone bees. By mating with many drones, she increases the genetic diversity of the colony which is important for colony productivity and disease resistance. After mating, a young and healthy queen will start laying eggs in the honeycomb within three days, up to 2,000 eggs per day to increase the population. A queen can live up to seven years but usually she is replaced before that as her egg laying declines.

I will be opening up the hive in a couple of weeks to see if everything is going well and at that time will expect to see some capped brood.