Swarm... Collected!

After Friday's shenanigans, and a heavy downpour on Friday night, I was relieved to see that the bees in neighbour Mark's tree had survived the night.  They didn't seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere, so yesterday I set up a spare nucleus, with one drawn and four un-drawn frames, as near as I could to the swarm cluster.  My hope was that they might smell the wax, realise that the nuc was a nice warm dry place to live, and move in.  In the meantime, I had to wait.

I used the time to check the other hives, as I wanted to know where they'd swarmed from.  Not the nucleus - Dorothy was still at home.  And Katherine was still in residence in hive #1.  That could only mean that the new queen, who was first seen last weekend in hive #2, must have swarmed.

I had a good look inside #2, and spotted a lovely big queen cell that I completely failed to see last week.  That was my mistake - if I'd seen and removed it, the bees wouldn't have swarmed.  I could see that the new (newest) queen had emerged from the cell - and I spotted her on the next frame.  She is quite distinctive-looking, with a single ginger stripe on the anterior segment of her abdomen.  At least she should be fairly easy to find in future.

Back to the swarm.  By this morning, they still hadn't moved from the tree, and it was looking like something needed to be done - Mark and his family really needed their garden back!  So, this afternoon Amelia and I tooled up and headed round to Mark's house with a spare bee suit and a very vague idea of a plan.

Mark had a couple of ladders that we could use, and was happy to join in the fun.  So I headed up a ladder with a pair of long-handled loppers, while Amelia held on tight and Mark got ready to catch.  We had to have three goes at it, because the bees kept re-clustering on the tree.  This was how it went on attempt number one:

I didn't get a video of attempt number two, but here's the third and final try:

And it's done!  The bees are now safely at home in the nucleus - hopefully they'll stay there and we'll have no more funny business.