We were having dinner with our neighbors last Saturday night, when I checked my phone and saw a text message from a number I didn’t recognize. Even stranger was the picture in the text message…it was a swarm of honeybees…

Yep, that’s right, just a swarm of honeybees hanging out on the ground. The message ended up being from a friend’s husband who had just spotted them in their backyard. By the time I got the text message it was already after 9pm, and I knew that we didn’t have time to get the bees that night. I let our friends know that we’d show up to their house about a half hour before daylight ~5:30ish on Sunday morning to pick up the honeybees.

Honeybees typically swarm when an existing hive is getting too full. The bees sense the lack of space and begin to form a new Queen. The existing Queen then leaves the hive with approximately half of the honeybees to go and find a new home…almost like an offspring from the parent hive. Before they leave the hive, all of the worker bees fill their bellies full of honey and then they take off! They usually land in a location like a tree or bush and cluster together while the scout bees identify a place for the new colony to take up residence. It’s during this “break” period where you can catch a swarm of honeybees, but only if you’re lucky!

When we arrived in the morning, the bees were all clustered together and very docile. The bees are generally docile because they’re so full of honey, kind of like a “food coma.” We were able to use a garden trowel to lightly scoop the honeybees up into an empty hive body.

We quickly realized that the Queen was most likely in the clump of bees near the grass, so The Renaissance Man made and executive decision to cut a bit of the grass away so he could lift it up and place it into the box. We knew this was the right move because as soon as that clump of grass was in the box the bees all started to file into the hive…we had captured the Queen!

We did end up with quite a bit of extra debris in the hive box, so before we left, we slowly lifted out the grass and shook it a bit to get all the bees to fall back down into the box.

It’s hard to believe that in 45 minutes we had captured and re-homed an entire swarm of honeybees. If you didn’t know better, you would never suspect a swarm of bees was hanging out on this little clump of grass.

The Renaissance Man and I then carried the hive back to the truck and strapped them down for our return trip to Dundee. Thankfully at 6:30am on a Sunday not too many people are out on the road…it was a quick trip!

When we arrived back in Dundee, we actually had to make room for the new hive by sliding each of my yellow hives to the end of the hive stand. While we had supplies for five hives, we only really anticipated having four hives this summer.

Since this swarm of bees was on the smaller side, we removed the top hive body. The bees will have plenty of room in the single hive body for the next month or so before we need to add more brood frames. Shortly after this picture was taken, we removed the last bit of duct tape from the entrance and let the bees go explore Dundee!

Three cheers all around…we caught our first swarm of honeybees!