Collecting a swarm, and what to do with it

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The call, and what to ask

Most swarms come off on warm sunny days from May to the end of July, usually between 11am and 4pm. Often it is a fine day after a poor spell. The cluster forms within about fifteen minutes. 3

Plenty of calls turn out not to be honey bees, so ask for a photograph before you get in the car. Then ask four things.

• How big is the cluster.
• How high is it, and will a ladder reach.
• How long has it been there.
• Have they called anyone else.

Say on the phone that collecting is two visits: the bees go into a box on the first one, and you come back in the evening for the box. If the swarm came out of your own hive, that is a different job: stopping your own colonies swarming.

What lives in the car boot

A swarm call does not wait while you go shopping. Keep the lot in one crate in the car from April.

• A nucleus box with frames of foundation. The NBU says most beekeepers choose this, and it means you collect and hive into the same box. 1
• A skep or a stout cardboard box as the fallback, with an old loose weave sheet and plywood to cover the open side.
• Smoker, fuel, matches, hive tool, bee brush. Secateurs, a saw, and a water spray.
• A queen cage. The BBKA advise caging her where you can. It makes the collection easier and absconding less likely, and a swarm with virgin queens often has more than one. 2
• String and your phone.

When to walk away

The NBU puts this before any of the method. If you cannot reach a swarm safely, leave it. If taking it would put anyone at risk, leave it. Ask the owner of the land before you start. 1

Height is the usual reason to stop. A skep gets much heavier the moment several thousand bees drop into it, and a ladder is a poor place to find that out. The notice beside that 2012 article set a three metre limit under the BBKA policy. Policies get rewritten, so read your current one.

Bees already inside a cavity wall, a roof void or a chimney are a different job. A beekeeper’s cover runs to swarms and stops short of a colony living in a building. 4 A swarm collector can help before the bees move into a cavity, and not after. 6 A chimney can mean opening up the building. 2 Say that on the phone, not on the doorstep.

Getting them into the box

Spread a large sheet on the ground under the swarm first. Bees that miss the box land on it and walk in if the queen is inside. 1

It is one sharp downward shake off a branch, or cut the branch and lower them in, or brush and smoke them across. With a nucleus box, take two or three frames out to leave a gap. Hold it under the cluster, shake hard into the middle, then replace the frames and fit the crown board.

Bees would rather walk up than down, so if the cluster is deep in a hedge, put the box above it and smoke gently from below. 2

Then watch the gap. Bees standing with their tails up and fanning means you almost certainly have the queen. If they march back out and reform on the branch, you do not. Waggle dancing on the cluster means the scouts have picked a home and your time is short.

Getting them home

Prop one edge of the skep up on a stone, by about 50 to 100 mm. Leave it until the flying bees and the scouts have followed the queen in. That is often late in the day, and it can mean a second trip. 2

Then tie the sheet over the container. Move it in the cool part of the day, because a swarm on the move gives off a lot of heat. It has to have air, and bees suffocate quickly in a sealed box.

Make the box secure in the car. A frightened driver is an accident.

Whose swarm is it

This gets stated far too confidently in both directions. In English law bees are wild animals, and a beekeeper gets a qualified property in them by hiving them. That property lasts through a swarm only so long as they are in sight and he has the “lawful power easily to pursue” them. 7

In Kearry v Pattinson, reported at [1939] 1 KB 471, a swarm settled next door and the neighbour refused the beekeeper entry. By the time permission came the bees had gone, and the court held the neighbour was not liable. The Court of Appeal went back over that rule in 2020. It said the case really turned on the power to pursue rather than on sight, because you cannot demand entry onto another person’s land.

What that decides is narrow. The beekeeper who lost the swarm cannot make a neighbour let him in to fetch it. It does not follow that the swarm is anyone’s for the taking, so ask whoever owns the ground. Nobody has to answer a swarm call either. But once you approach one meaning to take it, the BBKA treat it as yours, along with the job of keeping bystanders safe. 2

Hive it on foundation, not on your drawn comb

A swarm arrives with honey in its crops from the hive it left. On fresh foundation the bees have to spend that honey making wax, and on drawn comb they store it instead. 1 If the old colony had foulbrood, that honey may carry it into comb you meant to keep. 2

There are two ways in. Tip them into a gap in the frames, or run them up a sloped board covered with a sheet. If you are walking them in, fit the excluder only once they are all inside.

On foundation the NBU puts a queen excluder under the brood box for a couple of days, so the swarm settles rather than absconding. Take it out once she is laying, and never leave it beyond 72 hours, because a cast is headed by a virgin who has to get out and mate.

The NBU allows one exception: a swarm taken late in the year, with too little season left to draw foundation, may have to go on clean sterilised drawn comb.

Feeding, and where the advice differs

The documents genuinely disagree here, so both lines are worth knowing.

• The NBU quarantine fact sheet says a swarm can be fed after 24 hours if it needs it, using clean feeders. 5
• The older NBU article says check at 24 to 48 hours. If the foundation is not being drawn, give 1:1 syrup, which it puts at 1 kg of white granulated sugar to 1,260 ml of water. 1
• The BBKA leaflet says close to the opposite. Do not feed for at least four days, and only then if it needs it, because often there is no need at all. 2

What nobody disputes is why you would feed. A swarm spends its stores on wax, and a week of rain on top of that leaves it with nothing. Watch the weather, and watch whether the foundation is being drawn. See the two syrup mixes and what to put it in.

Quarantine, because you do not know where it came from

This is the part that gets skipped, and it matters most. A swarm from an unknown source is a colony of unknown health. The NBU is plain that swarms move pests and disease about. 1

The NBU asks for a separate quarantine apiary, with the swarm going onto foundation in boxes that are clean. Then two brood cycles, which is six weeks, with the brood checked before the colony joins an established apiary. 5 If it does show signs of foulbrood, put the site under a voluntary standstill and contact the NBU. That reporting duty is immediate.

Six weeks is the floor, not the target. European foulbrood can take far longer than that to show itself, and some beekeepers isolate a swarm for up to two seasons.

Most of us have one site and no second apiary, so do what the ground allows. Put as much distance between it and the rest as you can. Where space is tight, face the new entrance the opposite way to the nearest hive. 2 Keep its boxes, frames and excluder for that colony alone.