The video would have went viral.
What a fiasco. Tomorrow will tell if the comedy was worth it.
I was going to take a year off from beekeeping due to recent surgery and rehabilitation for a pinched nerve resulting in a very weak right arm. Apparently the bees did not like that plan.
Needless to say, I was not prepared with equipment for capturing a swarm, so I was improvising on the fly. I went with the bucket on a stick method after trying to cut down a branch using a ladder on a very flimsy tree. My sister tried to help by giving a tug on the branch as I was sawing it. Thank goodness I was only about 5 or 6 ladder rungs up when she catapulted me off the ladder. Somehow I landed on my feet. No harm, no foul.
The bees kept congregating back in the tree in smaller amounts after every attempt to shake them off into a bucket that I dumped into the deep box with drawn comb. I think somehow eventually the queen settled on the side of a deep box so I tried to coax them into the box.
The cluster that settled on the deep was much smaller than the one in the tree.
Being that it is the low is predicted to be 42 degrees tonight and I started at 5:30 this evening, I did not think time was on my side.
We shall see. If they are still there tomorrow, I might give them a frame with some brood on it. For now they have a frame of honey, a frame of pollen and 8 frames of drawn comb.
Modified to add:
Does the 3 feet or 3 miles rule apply to newly captured swarms. Can I move the hive 300 feet to a neighbor's property?
Most likely you have them. Good luck.
If they are all in the box at daylight, YES, you can move them. Do it ASAP, before they have time to orient.
would loved to have been a "bee on the wall" to watch the fiasco. Sounds exactly like something that would happen to me.
When you move them cut the section of the branch that they congregated on and put it on the bottom board in the new location for one day.
They left.
Oh, well. I am left with just a story to tell.
:grin:
As sure as the sun rises, there will be other swarms. Last year, I saw 1. This year, I have seen 3. Next year, who knows? I imagine when people get multiple hives, they see lots of swarms, in spite of good management.