Bees!

A fellow in the county keeps bees on Jimmy and Regina's farm, and on Saturday, a group of them decided to swarm.

Jimmy saw the swarm on a branch within a pile of branches (as he was about to relocate the pile to another place).

Jimmy called the beekeeper, and within a couple of hours, the beekeeper had come...

Easy to recognize his vehicle!

Preparing the nucleus (nuke) bee hive box by spraying the frames with sugar water to supply initial food for the new residents

Suiting up to move them from the branch into the nuke box

Spraying them with sugar water to calm them down and give them a little food before moving them

He had also lit smoke pot to calm and quiet the bees before he attempted to move them.

Here is a video of him "encouraging" the swarm to leave the branch and drop into the nuke box.

In case the embedded video does not work: https://youtu.be/h0_YLdvOr4o

Many of the bees are in the nuke box, he was working to get the prepared frames into it...

... inserting frames. The bees will want to start making comb so the queen can start laying eggs.

Inside cover in place

There were still quite a number on the branch, so he put the box back underneath the branch and shook it again to encourage the last ones to leave the branch.

He created a place to put the nuke box under pallets so the bees would be shaded from sun.

While he was there, he told us quite a lot about bees -- I don't know whether I've gotten it all correct or not, but here's what I remember: The bees will swarm when the number in the existing hive has gotten too large. At that point, the hive (the group of worker bees in the hive) feed larvae a specific diet to produce one or more additional queens (royal jelly?). Either the newly produced queen, or the old queen, will then leave the hive with about 1/2 of the workers to find a new home -- the swarm. They don't go too far to begin with, finding a branch on which to settle (the branch that they had settled on was under 20' from the existing hive). It seems that they are quite docile at this point (for about 24-36 hours) - they are looking for a new home, not trying to defend their home. The workers that have gone with the queen are attracted to her and staying with her. Some of the workers have gone out as scouts looking for a new place to build their hive - if they find a place, they will return to the swarm and the swarm will follow them to the new place. The goal of the beekeeper is to relocate the queen and workers to a hive box before they leave for a new home found by the scouts. 

In this case, as long as the beekeeper got the queen into the nuke box on his first disturbance of the swarm, all the rest would eventually go into the nuke box. They are committed to staying with their queen.

It was fascinating to be here right when this occurred. The beekeeper said that swarms are more likely at this time of year -- something I read indicated that they are more likely when the weather is changing from chilly and rainy to warmer and sunny. He also implied that he may have been able to ward off the hive's need to split if he had given them more room (there are "annex" type things that he can add to the hive box).