Nature's Freebies/Free Bees

A few nights ago we arrived home from a family barbecue to find a series of post-its stuck to our front door. One of our neighbors had a swarm of bees in the eaves of his roof and wanted to know if they were ours and could we please remove them. They weren't our bees but were wild bees that had swarmed, or left their home in search of a new one. Swarming bees aren't aggressive, as they don't have a hive to protect. Russ thought we should try and catch them, doing ourselves and our neighbors a favor. We've spent a lot of money on bees and bee equipment over the past few months and so we were excited at the prospect of free bees.

We had a friend staying with us and he and Russ collected the necessary swarm-catching equipment, namely a box, ladder and flashlights, and headed over to the neighbors to catch our very first swarm of wild bees. We had some confidence that this would work, as we had seen it all on the tv show River Cottage.

As it happened, catching the swarm was straightforward. Russ and Alex climbed ladders and Alex held the box as Russ brushed the basketball-sized and shaped swarm into the box. Things got a little more difficult once we got the box home, where the goal was to get the new bees into a hive as smoothly as possible. We set up operations in the garage and did everything just as we had seen on tv, only the bees weren't interested in forming an orderly queue and marching into the hive in an efficient fashion.

We should have just left the bees in their box until morning, as they would have been just fine and much more prone to cooperation in the daylight. But by this time, it was nearly midnight and we were eager to get the bees into the hive and go to bed. So Russ opened the box, containing perhaps ten thousand or so bees, and tried to dump them in the hive. This plan probably would have worked if we'd used a smaller box or just cut open one small corner. But the box we used was much wider than the hive and when we opened the lid wide and tried to dump them in, many of them missed the mark. It was very late at night and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It only took a few seconds for our garage to be filled with thousands of angry bees. At that point, I decided that the whole thing was a little too intense and went to bed.

Eventually Russ and Alex were able to get the bees to calm down, mainly by turning of the lights for a while. They collected the majority of the bees into the hive and set the new hive next to the other two at the far end of our yard. Miraculously, Russ was only stung twice and Alex and I managed to get away without being stung at all. The bees that remained in our garage were dead by the next morning, as they needed the whole colony to provide necessary heat. Still, we were very pleased to get a new colony for free, if you don't count the stress of standing in a mostly-enclosed area with thousands of angry bees.