A swarm of bees in May

Photos and text by Sarah Phelan

Yesterday, my neighbor's bees swarmed for the third time this year, and each time they decided to stop off on the branch of what my neighbor calls "Ye Olde Bee Tree." This stopover gives my neighbor a chance to collect the swarm before it takes off into the wild in search of a new nesting site. But while the video (scroll to end of this blog post) makes it look easy, catching a swarm takes a lot of skill and this clip only shows the beekeeper brushing stragglers off the branch: the rest of the swarm has already been swept off in large clumps into a cardboard box

Complicating this swarm catching was the fact that it occured towards sunset, giving the bees only a short time to figure out where their new home was, after they were relocated, via cardboard box, into a new hive in the beekeeper's backyard. However, the yard is really close to the tree--and it's the same yard that the bees swarmed from, making the terrain a bit more familiar for a bunch of somewhat confused bees!