And Another One!

A couple of Fridays ago, I got a call from local bee enthusiast Gerry (who was involved in the previous post's shenanigans) letting me know about another swarm.  This time, it was a small-ish swarm, around shoulder height, in a small fir tree at the crazy golf course in Victoria Park:

This looked like a nice easy one - and since Gerry and I had just had practice with the previous swarm, we were feeling pretty confident.  Everything started well - the whole swarm dropped easily into Gerry's bucket when I shook the branch, and they all went into the nucleus in one go.

But, that was when it all started to get a bit more complicated.  As you can see from the photo above, there were quite a lot of bees on top of the nucleus, and airborne in front of it.  We watched for a few minutes, hoping they would settle down.  Instead, the opposite happened - and bees started walking out of the nucleus and gathering at the front:

This looked like a problem - when bees do this, it usually means they are about to re-swarm.  Gerry and I discussed what to do, but the reality is, when this starts to happen, there is almost nothing you can do to stop it.  Your only chance is to find the queen, and somehow keep her in the nucleus.  But, really, what are the chances of spotting a queen among a swarm of 10,000 bees?

And that's when I watched the queen walk right out of the front of the nucleus.

I had to act fast.  The next conversation went something like this:

"That's the queen Gerry - I can see her, right there on the front of the nuc.  What do I do?  Do I grab her?"

"Yeah, I think you need to pick her up."

"Yeah - I think you're right.  OK.  I'm doing it."

And with that, I reached towards the front of the nuc, aimed a finger and thumb at the queen... and missed.  You pick up a queen bee by her wings, and it's not the most difficult thing to do, but I'm a clumsy oaf.  The thing is, if you miss once, she'll usually wiggle about a bit, and you have to hope she stays pointing in roughly the right direction (if you're right-handed, it's easiest if she's facing up and to the left).  If you miss twice, she'll get spooked and start haring off and you'll never catch her.  So I basically had one more shot.  I leaned in, breathed in, hovered a finger and thumb over her...

And got her!

This was great - now all I needed was something to put her in.  A matchbox would have been ideal.  Or my queen cage, which I'd foolishly left locked in the car.  Gerry had a quick chat with the chaps who ran the crazy golf, who went to have a rummage in their shed.  it felt like I was standing there for ever, holding onto this little insect who desperately wanted to wriggle free.  And trying not to hold on too tight, for fear of damaging her wings.  And then they came back, with an empty box that they used to keep their allen keys in.  It was good enough - I flipped open the flap, popped her inside, closed it up and put some gaffer tape on to make sure she couldn't escape.

The next problem was making sure all the other bees knew where she was.  They keep track of the queen via pheromones, which were of course now all circulating inside the box.  So, back to the shed to get a large screw, which I used to make some holes in the box.  And then I carefully placed the queen-in-a-box into the nucleus, and hoped the bees would be able to pick up the scent of her pheromones.

In case you are wondering, none of this is by-the-book swarm collection.  It was pretty much a combination of amateur hour, and making it up as we went along.  But, amazingly, it worked.  The bees picked up the scent, calmed down, and started heading back into the nucleus.  All was looking fine.  Until Gerry asked the obvious question:

"How are you going to get her out at the other end?"

Yeah.  I hadn't thought of that.  This was when my queen cage (now retrieved from the car) was going to come in useful.  It's basically a cylinder with a plunger, that looks like this:

If we could transfer the queen into the cage, and put that into the nucleus, then releasing the queen at the other end would be as easy as pulling the plunger.  But first we had to get the queen out of the box and into the cage.

Gerry devised a plan where we would cut the top of the box on three sides, peel back the flap and then put the cage over the queen.  So, back to the shed for a razor blade, and then we took the box out of the nucleus and I knelt down next to Gerry while he started cutting.  I was hoping he wouldn't slice through the queen...

Gerry told me he was ready, pulled back the flap (and got a sting for his efforts) and... no queen.  Well, not that we could see - the problem was, lots of bees had followed the pheromone trail, so the area where we'd been cutting the box now looked like this:

I felt I had no choice - I was going to have to put the open box back into the nucleus, and hope for the best.  I was just about to place it back, when the queen walked out and stood herself right in the middle of the bottom of the box.  This time there was no need to pick her up - I still had the queen cage in my other hand, so I carefully placed it over her, made sure she was at the far end of the cylinder and pushed the plunger half an inch in.  Now that she was secure, I put the queen cage into the nucleus, put the roof on, and waited.  After about half an hour, things were much more calm.

That was the hard part over, and after another half an hour I closed up the entrance, took the bees back to the apiary and put them in the hive.  Not a textbook swarm collection by any means, but at least I now have two full beehives again, which I'm really pleased about.  Neither of the queens have names yet, but that will probably be the subject of the next post.