Honeybee Swarm Days are coming

It looks like we are headed into some warm, clear days this week~ this is swarm weather.

In a classic case of do as I say, not as I do, I want to advise beekeepers to get on it this month, if they haven't already. It is so much simpler to add a super before the colony swarms than to go out to your beehives, see that you have a swarm now, this minute,and they're looking for a new place to go.

If you haven't given them a super, do you have a second hive box ready to go? Are the frames assembled with beeswax foundation? Did you paint it already with a few days to air out and cure? Bottom board, top board? Now's the time to tend to your bees.

Swarms are great in that it is the plan to spread out and multiply the population this way, new colonies, but who wants to see their bees flying off to who knows where?

Even if you have your box ready and waiting (or cobbled together fast as you can, ahem) the swarm might be in an awkward place to capture or coax. They aren't always handily on a small branch that can be trimmed easily and placed over/in the hive. The swarm we have right now is on the trunk of a tree and is refusing our best offering. Oh well, they are welcome to a good life where they can find it. It's not like we do it for the honey, which we hardly gather. It's just a cool thing to have bees. (OK it would be cooler if we'd get some honey more often, agreed.)

So, you can be organized and plan in advance or you can just do the best you can, with procrastination etc. It all works, pretty much. I was told in one workshop that the less we do to our bees (medicate, supplement, coddle in various ways) the stronger the species, so we are pretty much doing our best in that regard. :)

We were always told that we have to requeen to have a healthy hive. Kill our Queen (to replace her with an artificially inseminated one)? Sorry, no way. We just can't do it. These bees seem to make their own new queens just fine and the hives live on year after year. [It would be different if there were Africanized bees in the area, of course.] We may have lost this swarm due to our slacker beekeeping ethos, but we have a fresh new queen in the hive the bees just left as the old queen leaves with the swarm. It is a consolation.

We go to Western Farm Center in old Railroad Square for all our beekeeping supplies and a fount of knowledge and advice when we need it.

So, you can be organized and prepared and save yourself a lot of trouble, or you can be a by-the-seat-of-your-pants beekeeper and let the bees figure it out. It's just a good thing to do.
Watch for swarms in the next few days and if you see one, know that there are loads of beekeepers willing and ready to come get it and give them a protected home, if the new colony accepts it. They may just prefer a hollow tree, no matter what you proffer.