I’ve just shared a video of one of our hives swarming on our Facebook page – take a look here.
Despite the amount of buzzing and bees swirling around, swarms are not aggressive – they are simply looking for a new home. It really is an amazing sight. Once the bees have left the hive they usually cluster together somewhere until scout bees have found a suitable new home for the colony.
I was lucky that the swarm decided to settle on a nearby oak tree and I was able to easily shake them into a box and then install them into a clean hive.
If you ever are lucky enough to see a swarm clustering like in the picture above, you can contact a beekeeper, who will be able to come and remove them for you. The British Beekeepers Association have an really helpful website to help the general public identify a swarm. It also has information about how to contact a local beekeeper who will be willing to collect them. Link here
I’m so pleased to see your photos of a happy swarm of bees, such a natural part of the honeybee’s life cycle and the pinnacle of the queen’s reign! 😉 A friend of mine recently called about a swarm of bees landed on the road in her street and I helped her contact a local swarm collector. Unfortunately the human population had not been kind to this swarm and by the time the swam collector had arrived, a few cars had driven over the cluster and a neighbour reported that the swarm had been treated with pesticides 🙁 My friend said the beekeeper took away the surviving bees to see if they could survive with his hives, so I hope the survivors had a happy ending. Much more needs to be done to get the public to understand this natural seasonal cycle and how to react to it. Let’s hope your post is widely read! 🙂
That is a sad tale. I hope the surviors made it. So many people are really scared of anything flying, it is such a shame that we have become so disconnected from nature…