Forgot to share this crazy happenstance of events. So my family and I keep honey bee's, last year I developed an allergy to their stings but that's not important to this story.
Gonna put a break here but there's pics of bees swarming below the cut if you're interested!
So we have a little homemade green house out by our beehives and I was in there planting some gourd seeds that finally started to sprout ( 2/10 so far 😭) and while I was out there I was like "why do the bees sound like they've been getting louder?" Figured it was just me and didn't pay much mind.
Then I turn to leave the green house and see loads of flying around!! Startling! Caught them right as they were starting to swarm. I go in to talk with a family member about it but we've only had this happen once before and we didn't know till it was too late and haven't had a hive make it over the winter since. I decided to head back out and see what they're doing now a few mins later and sure enough! They were in fact swarming and had clustered on a nearby tree right in easy reach for us!
They were really weighing down those branches, I think one cluster fell off because of the weight haha.
Sadly in the rush of things I left my phone inside while changing so I wasn't able to get any more photos of the process but it's a pretty simple one.
I'll try to explain it!
So basically we go grab an empty hive and put it under the clusters and just shake them off into the box haha.
If we had a little thing to put the queen we would go looking for her first (though we've never been good at that) so that we can be sure she got in. It kinda looks like those plastic hair clips with the claws, but like to hold a bee haha.
We know the queen is in the hive once other worker bees literally start marching into the box, highly recommend looking up a video of it, it's wild they just form a line walking right in. Other bees will stick their butts in the air and use their wings to fan out pheromones for other bees to find the nest.
After we get most the bees in we close up the top, we did put in some frames with some honey on them to give them a little boost and entice them to stay ;)
During the whole process the bees are surprisingly chill! Swarming bees (assuming they aren't of the killer bee variety) are! They have no brood or honey to protect at this point and are really exposed.
We had gone and checked our other hives as well as the one this came from to see if any others were about to swarm and they are all remarkably chill as well, we suspect whatever pheromones the swarming hive gave off was also affecting the other hives.
Oh and to add the hive that had swarmed had already FILLED with honey?! ITS NOT EVEN JUNE!! We gave them an extra honey medium and even took two frames out of their brood deeps that were just honey and scored them to uncap them so that the honey would be recollected by all the hives. And we replaced them with empty frames for them to hopefully put brood on this time.
Also the photo above, they aren't trying to establish a home there. They're collecting there to wait for scouts to come back and tell them about potential new locations for their home. Figured I should add that.
Also when a hive swarms they more like splitting into 2 hives. The one that leaves has the current queen that they've been training and getting ready for this. And the old hive is in the process of making a new queen with premade queen cells and they feed the larva a very rich honey, often called Royal Jelly, to turn what would just be a worker into a queen.
These little bugs really plan this shit out.
So anyways that evening we went to check on them and make sure they were still in the box and sure enough they're still hanging around!
You might also notice that doesn't look like a typical wooden hive box. It's made of styrofoam so it's lighter than the traditional wooden nest while also being like 10x more insulating.
It gets pretty cold in the winter here with a lot of temperature fluctuations, lot of melt and freeze, and some strong northern winds so it helps them out in the winter.
And lastly look at this gorgeous uh... I think wasp? She was just hanging out on a bird bath, beautiful colors, I don't recognize the species sense I'm not from Florida but she was huge and probably had a nasty sting to match.
