At the Bee Tree, a small cluster of bees has already formed on the usual branch, about eight feet above the ground. Around them, though, tens of thousands of bees are still flying around excitedly. Looking on, I understand why people get freaked out when they see a swarm. It looks like all those cartoons of some hapless victim being chased by angry bees. But, of course, these bees aren't angry. They're stuffed with honey and they just want to find a safe place where they can chill for a while, wait, and digest. They stuff themselves because they may not be able to eat for a few days. They will wait, grouped protectively around the queen, while a few dozen scouts go looking for a permanent new home.
The scary look of a swarm actually makes sense. It tends to scare away birds and animals. Also, by moving in a chaotic mass, the bees provide tens of thousands of targets for any predator that may try to pick them out of the air, making survival of the queen that much more probable.
My tools today are a cardboard box, a sheet, a frame of wax previously used for raising brood from a hive, a stepstool, my bee suit, and a large soft brush. The brush is specially designed to gently sweep the bees off the branch without hurting them. Some old-timers use a goose wing. And the empty frame provides a smell of home and normality, calming the bees.
I am grateful for the Bee Tree because most local swarms make a beeline to it. It makes my life easier. The bees may smell the scents of previous swarms on it, because they tend to go to one or the other of two specific branches, both of them easily reachable with a stepstool. The first arrivals crawl all over it, leaving a fresh bee scent on the branch, and began fanning their wings to broadcast the pheromone message of “Yo! We're over here!” to the others.
This procedure usually works out great. Sometimes, though, something goes wrong. One morning earlier in the season, I'd watched them go through the same routine and gather on the branch. Ten minutes later, though, the swarm had shrunk to about half its previous size, and the bees were peeling off from the group in ones and twos and heading sheepishly back to their old hive. They had apparently gotten there, and the queen hadn't shown up. (I imagine her saying embarrassedly, “Oh, was that today?”) They tried again, more successfully, later in the day.
Without my intervention, they'd typically stay on this branch for one to two days before scouts found some suitable place and led the cloud of bees to it. I don't want them to do that for a couple of reasons. For one, I'd rather have them be a part of my apiary than try to establish a new home somewhere else. For another, this isn't a wild place, so they'd probably find a hole in the wall of a house or someplace similarly likely to get them exterminated. So, my job today is to convince them they'd be happier in an empty hive body and back in my apiary.
It isn't so hard. If you provide good surroundings, they'll usually stay. I lay my old bedsheet under the swarm, settle the comb firmly inside the cardboard box to give them something to hold on to, and climb a step or two up the stepladder.
The bees are peacefully clumped together now. I hold the box a few inches under the mass of bees, grab the branch they're resting on, and give it a sudden, solid shake. Since only a few hundred bees are actually gripping the branch and the rest are holding on to them, a good sudden shake will result in about 80 percent of the bees falling into the box. Most of the rest can be gently swept into it with the bee brush.
Everything works the way it's supposed to. Mostly. There are always the hardcore holdouts that won't leave the tree, the bees that end up on the ground below, and those that fly instead of falling into the box. Frankly, though, there's only one bee I especially hope ends up in the box: the queen. If she's in there and doesn't flee, the rest of the bees will eventually follow her. To this end, I lay the box on its side on the sheet and mostly close it up, leaving a box flap partly open.
The queen is in there, and I see bees fanning her scent at the openings of the box and straggler bees landing and crawling in. If she weren't in there, bees would be crawling out and returning to their place on the branch . . . or wherever she decided to fly next. I leave the box there for an hour in the shade so the scout bees can find their swarm-mates when they return to find the branch empty.
Later, I gently shake and brush the bees into an empty hive body and watch to see that they start fanning their scent from the hive entrance. They do. The queen's inside, all is well, and they're broadcasting to any latecomers, “We're over here! Welcome home!”