How to Capture a Swarm of Bees

Are you a beekeeper who has had a swarm of bees form in the spring and you’re just not sure what to do with them? Capturing the swarm will mean that you have a new bee colony for free! In this article, we’ve included the needed equipment, basic steps, and a few tricks to help you capture your swarm of bees.

PLEASE NOTE: If you are a new beekeeper, do NOT attempt to capture a swarm of bees by yourself! Find a local beekeeper to assist you or contact your local beekeeping association to have someone come out and remove them for you. 

How to Capture a Swarm of Bees

Before we explain the process of capturing a swarm of bees, there are a few questions about bee swarms that need to be answered. We also need to go over the required equipment and preparation for the process.

Let’s get started!

Why Do Bees Swarm?

Every spring, beekeepers wait for the swarming season. Swarming is the natural process of creating new colonies of honey bees.

New queen bees are hatched inside the hive in the spring. However, a hive can only have one queen. Sometimes, if more than one queen hatches in a hive, the queens fight it out and whoever wins is in charge. Other times, the older queen will take off with the percentage of the bee court that’s loyal to her.

The swarm is the part that goes off in a hissy to find a new place to set up their own colony. Other types of swarming behavior can occur, but that’s usually what happens.

Can You Prevent Swarming?

Some beekeepers circumvent swarming by simply watching for signs of it and splitting the hive to give each queen her own collection of worker bees.

This is done by taking a queen and placing her in a brood box with a collection of workers. A brood box is two times deeper than a honey super and allows lots of room to encourage a large population of baby bees.

• I Love Beekeeping can teach  you how to prevent and control swarming.

Preventing a swarm is a good idea for at least two reasons:

1. A swarm of bees can be a potentially scary thing if you live in a neighborhood surrounded by people who aren’t too happy with stinging insects being so close.
2. If you split the hive in time you will have two hives that will produce honey, where once you had only one. If you let the bees swarm, you risk losing them to the wild.

Learning how to prevent swarming and how to split your hive is a great skill to have. Should you fail to do that in time, learning to capture a swarm of bees is also a good skill.

Related Bee Information:

How to Prepare for Beekeeping

How to Extract Raw Honey with an Extractor

5 Homesteader Reasons to Find a Local Beekeeper

The Reality for This Homestead Bee Keeper

Every year I promise myself I’ll get down to the hives and make sure I split them in time. I’ll find a new queen, toss in some brood racks and honey, and be all set.

But every year I get caught up in pruning or planting and so watch half my hives take off to parts unknown. Which is exactly what I did this year except that my swarm had the decency to settle in my yard.

Unfortunately, they made a home nestled in the maze of trumpet and honeysuckle vines above our small pond. I was undaunted, though, and after my daughter came rushing in to tell me she saw the swarm settle, we both suited up and went out to get those bees!

Equipment You Might Need to Capture a Swarm of Bees

Some basic equipment you need to capture a swarm of bees:

• Protective clothing, gloves, and a bee veil
• Bucket or box with a lid
• Extra hive components like brood boxes, empty frames, frames with honey or a feeder with honey water, extra top and bottom board
• Hand tools like a limb saw, garden clippers, bee brush, and your hive tool

Some people can work with bee without any special clothing. My husband and a lot of other men I know have this ability. I wonder if it’s a guy-pheromone-hormone thing.

But my daughter and I aren’t among those people. So, we covered up with long sleeves and pants, plus our veils, and gloves.

The Basic Process of Capturing a Swarm of Bees

Because swarms are unpredictable, each swarm of bees will have to be evaluated on site. If the swarm is easy to access, here are the basic steps of capturing a swarm of bees.

1. Assemble your equipment, as per the equipment list above. Be sure that a new hive is set up to receive the new colony of bees.
2. Get all your protective clothing on and keep your bee brush handy.
3. The bees will clump around the queen, creating in essence a ball of bees. Gently brush this clump over the rim of the bucket or box. Be careful and be patient.
4. If you can’t get all the bees into the bucket or box without riling them up, step back and allow the straggling bees to follow their queen on their own. Wait only a few minutes or they might take off and swarm again.
5. Empty the bucket or box into your new beehive box and place the lid on top. Make sure you’ve put some bee food in the box to make them feel at home.
6. Set the bucket or box next to the new hive and the last of the stragglers will enter the hive to find their queen.

Be Careful of Africanized Bees When Capturing a Swarm of Bees

If you’re not sure where the swarm came from, especially if you live in the southern U.S. or South America, it would be prudent to check for occurrences of Africanized bees in your area.

Africanized bees are much more aggressive, often dangerously so, than other honey bees. Always be cautious when approaching a swarm of bees, but reconsider collecting them if you’re concerned they might be Africanized.

Africanized bees are very prone to swarm, so be advised. To find out if you have these bees in your area:

• Google the term “Africanized bees” and your location to pull up current information.
• Reach out to your local bee keeping groups to discuss how these bees may or may not be effecting your community.

To learn more about Africanized bees in general:

• How to Tell if Your Bees Are Africanized, by Beekeeping Like a Girl
• Understanding Africanized Bees Better, by Bee Health Extension

Homestead Example of NOT Preventing a Swarm of Bees

Again, I point out that, with vigilance, you can prevent your hives from swarming. If you keep an eye on them and split them yourself, there’s no need to do battle with a bunch of vines and tree limbs.

Make time to monitor you hives closely in spring!

However, as part of the story for this article, I have to be totally honest and confess that I neglected to split my hives. So, I had a swarm of bees on my hand.

My daughter got a large bucket with a lid and I dashed off to get my bee tools and clippers. Since the swarm of bees had settled amongst limbs and vines, I knew I was going to have to cut away some of the vines.

Still, I hoped I could get at the queen without too much trouble. It looked like a very substantial amount of bees was on the outside of the vines.

I clipped and removed some branches and then began brushing, very gently, the bees into the bucket.

Assess & Readjust the Plan for the Swarm of Bees

As I did so, I realized that the bees had settled all over inside those vines and that there was no way I was going to get them out of there in their entirety. I also realized that there was no way I was going to be able to hack through all those vines to cut them out.

Resolved, I went and dumped what I had into an empty brood box with some frames and honey, hoping that I had the queen in the middle of what I’d brushed off. A few days later I went to check and, no joy. The bees had left and joined up with the crew I’d taken them from.

A few days after that, we checked the vines and the swarm had taken off. I mention this part of the adventure because I want you to know that not everything works the first time you try it. Sometimes you do the best you can and your efforts fall flat.

That’s just the homesteading life.

Maybe I should have called this article: How to Miserably Fail at Capturing a Swarm of Bees the Frist Time. But, I thought, How to Capture a Swarm of Bees” might inspire more confidence.

What Finally Worked

Turns out, though – sweet, sweet bees – the swarm re-settled in our pine tree and on an easily accessible branch.

This time, we came back out with a bucket and a lid and simply cut them off the tree in a big bunch. To calm them, my husband smoked them. I usually use honey water because I struggle with maintaining the smoker.

We then gently placed the branch over the bucket and knocked them in, securing the lid as quick as possible.

If we’d have just a bit more clearance, we could have simply knocked the bee clump into the bucket, but there just wasn’t room in all the branches.

The bees cling together so its a relatively simple thing to knock them as a big clump – just be as gentle as you can. 

After the Swarm was Captured

We set them up in their new brood box with some honey frames to feed the queen and court while they set up a nursery for new bees. A few days later we had the beginnings of a thriving colony!

They immediately started drawing out comb and laying brood and gathering nectar and all other wonderful manner of bee activities.

Should a Newbie Capture a Swarm of Bees?

If you’re a newbie beekeeper or simply have a swarm you don’t how to handle, contact your local bee keeper association. They will have someone that can help you. Sometimes there’s a fee but most often the bee keeper is just happy to get free bees.

If you’re going to do it, make sure you have a local beekeeper to help you. It’s much safer to work bees with a partner.

Aside from that,  just make sure you have your regular bee keeping equipment:

• protective clothing
• bee brush
• smoker or honey water
• hive tool
• bucket with a lid

A Word on Smoking Before Collecting

Many beekeepers use a smoker tool to smoke their bees, masking the alarm pheromones that the worker bees typically send out when something disrupts their hive. There’s also an indication that bees assume the hive is on fire and gorge themselves on honey in preparation for making a new hive.

Visit Hobby Farms to learn more about why a bee keeper smokes the hive. 

So, you may want to smoke your bees before capturing the swarm. Since I’m like the Anti-Fire (I can’t keep a fire going to save my life), I use honey water in a spray bottle to distract the bees.

Bees are extremely fastidious little creatures and covering them in honey water makes them fussy. They want to be clean, so they stop and wash themselves off before figuring out what you’re doing.

• To make honey water mix 1/4 part warmed, raw honey and with 3/4 part filtered water in a spray bottle.

Save the Planet, Capture a Swarm of Bees

If you can possibly avoid it, please don’t kill your swarm of bees. The honey bee is so vital to our healthy ecology and they’re under threat, sadly.

As a beekeeper, stepping into this seasonal dance and securing a swarm of bees in order to provide it protection and love in your bee yard is a truly charitable thing to do. It’s good for mankind and the pollination of the world at large.

Plus, you get free bees. Score!

—>>>Pin This for Later<<<—