Keep your Swarms from Leaving!

highest cayman reynolds oh boy we got two swarms in this tree one about i don't know 15 feet up and this one right here that this is cayman level right here i'm on a downhill angle right now so we're gonna take this small one right here come and look at it closer and it was not here yesterday we were at this yard yesterday wasn't able to get through all the colonies before dark i'd say that's about four pounds of bees give or take we're just going to take this and i love these gesture nuke boxes for this and whamo all right just shut that up right there and now there's still a few bees left on there the only thing we need to make sure is that we don't miss the queen you know if it's just worker bees they'll go back to the original colony it won't be a big deal but sometimes the queen can be right in there amongst that cluster i didn't miss too awful manny i'll come back later and look at that want to keep this cool i'm going to give you a tip on how to keep your swarms and not have them leave on you now the trick is getting that other one king of the mountain no this is not a really awesome feeling i it's fun catching swarms i really don't enjoy catching my own swarms though it's just that time of the year though in tennessee i had someone call me um 30 minutes north of me wanting to get me to come out and grab a swarm of theirs lo and behold i had two of my own to catch today well you want to come up here and help me out wow see this it'll be really handy if ian or somebody tall was here to help me he's too busy dealing with snow storms probably right now trying to get some clearance here definitely don't want to shake them too hard there's a creek over there and the kids are playing and if you hear giggling in the background that's what's going on we're having a lot more fun than we are i'd like to break this limb but i'm afraid of jarring the bees too much and sending them i think it they've been only on here for a little while that helps come on now i've got some funny swarm stories with my brother got a couple really good swarm stories i have to get around to that in the live chat one of these days come on now there we go okay why i'm doing that is i want to be able to take this box now and get it right underneath and it's nice that these boxes are so light oh yeah that one's bigger first time i ever did one out of a cedar tree like this they love getting in cedar and pine trees they're great to have i feel pretty confident about getting the queen in that one but uh i can't remember what i was gonna say swarm fever i'm gonna check this one down here make sure that we have the queen very fortunate that we caught these what typically happens is that you have your hives swarm and they usually light pretty close by just like these did but they're sending out scouts tons of them and they're just going all over the place and it could be a mile or two away find a good cavity size maybe a swarm trap even and as they do that if they get a general consensus this is where we want to go and you shake them and then you like say drop it here at your bee yard but they've already decided we're going in that cavity a mile and a quarter away it doesn't matter you can put brood in there in my in my experience you can put a frame of eggs or a frame of larvae you can put honey in there you can hold them up for two days with a screen or something and if they still have that location in mind many times they'll still go to it that is why i'm a huge fan and of course i have several bee yards so it's easy for me both of these are going to go in the subaru with me and go to a completely different yard miles away it's going to be a complete reset and they'll not know where any cavity is we will throw in a frame of larvae and a frame of food and they won't have anywhere else in their mind to go and i've never lost a swarm like that be careful using any things to kill mites it's a great time to kill the mites though if you wait at the right time when you have a brood break like this what we're going to do is we're going to hide them inside a colony and then we're going to come back probably about a week or so and then we're going to see if the queen's laying and if she's laying her brood shouldn't have been capped at that point and then you can hit him with oxalic acid vapor it's the only issue though with giving them that larvae to lock them in is that that larvae could be already capped at that point i'm really pleased that they weren't any higher than that i wasn't sure even with the subaru in my short stature that kind of hurts to admit i've admitted it after all these years just take a moment of silence for my ego to just die anyways uh really happy that we got those let's check this one out over here they're building up and it it can take a little while for all the bees to actually swarm out of the colony but again all of these things are just going to find their way eventually back to the colony that they came from as long as we got the queen and i'll bet we didn't we caught 99.9 of the bees i'm glad to say i was able to get through the rest of the bee yard and the bees are in good shape but the nectar is flowing we're shaking out nectar pollen is filling up frames the brood nest is getting pretty full and so we've been throwing supers on and we're fixing to throw the bees in between some thunderstorms that have been rolling through now i want to show you a couple tips that are going to help you keep your bees your swarms inside your hives and also how you can get your foundation drawn a little bit better and just a couple of things like that so first of all before we hive the swarms i like to move them i think i said this in the other part of the video it makes a huge difference in my opinion when bees swarmed they start sending out scouts and especially if they've been hanging there a while they could have already found an ideal location they just haven't moved there yet and if you shake them down and they've already made up their mind they want to go somewhere they're going to leave your box even if there is brood in it now some people will argue this fact opinions are like noses but i have had swarms leave brood before now i think that's because they already had a cavity in mind and that stimuli was just so strong remember bees really don't rationalize they go for whatever stimuli is the strongest and if they feel like they are going to that cavity and they still can they're going to that's why i like to move them to a different bee yard if you have one or you can drop them on your family's property or a neighbor or something you know down the road a friend you know forgiveness is much easier to ask for than permission i'm not liable for anything that may or may not happen as a consequence of this video anyways but seriously i move my swarms every time every time and i've never lost the swarm since i started doing that but i also if possible you can add some frames of larvae so check these out right here this is um this one has some emerging bees as well but there's eggs and larvae down in this frame and we're pulling a lot of brood out of our production yards and so this is just a frame of brood and i shook the bees off because we don't really need to give these swarms extra bees but uh yeah the other frame has larvae in it as well and it's better than just giving them eggs the pheromone helps lock them in but it's new location and now we're gonna have this one thing that we are also going to show you real quick before we throw the bees in is so this is some partially drawn comes from last year swarms are incredibly good at drawing combs foundations out into combs you can give your swarms comb and they'll love it but they're already geared towards comb drawing there's nothing better at drawing foundation out than a swarm and so i feel like why not take advantage of that natural occurrence and get some new fresh comb so that's what we're going to do besides these two right here all this is foundation or partial foundations and we'll get them drawn but one thing i wanted to point out is look at all this right here from last year these pretty often will start from here and they'll build up off of that and make a weird funky strip now sometimes you'll still have everything perfectly clean and the bees will decide to be a little artful but one of the first things that i do whenever i put foundation on a single with bees in it or if i'm doing it with a swarm is i clean the top bars if i'm putting a whole box on or i just i clean the frames up before i put it in because sometimes they'll take that bur comb on those top board bars or the bottom of the frames and they'll just draw those right up and make frustrating little things in between your foundations so we're going to scrape this off real quick and it's best if you save this but got to get things done around here got a lot going on right now i'm gonna stick these back in now we're going to take these frames it'd be good to trim these a little bit too but i hate sacrificing brood it'll be all right and make sure these frames are pushed together nicely another thing that we're going to going to want to do is put the lids on first all right and we're going to do this one a little bit different differently this one has uh that one had a frame feeder this one is going to have an inner cover with a box on it and i'll show you the feeder we're going to use here in just one second all right do i have a lid well i do now i guess all right now let's get to shaking now some swarms are really gentle most of the time swarms are really easy going good behavior all of that kind of stuff one time i got more stings in a second than i've ever gotten in my life off of a swarm so you know in some videos you'll see people shaking swarms even without a veil on and hey people should be allowed to do whatever the heck they want but i will say that 90 of the time swarms are gentle but if you catch them on a bad day they will send you to the house all right i really like these jester boxes for this they're great and another thing i don't like dumping them like say i could dump them in that top box and let them run down into it i really prefer letting them run in the entrance and then push their pheromone inside and waft that through and i really think that's that's the way they do it in nature is they kind of occupy a hive like that so i like to let them run in all right laurel here we go i could have got that a little closer [Music] we could have a race and grab the other one see which one goes in first i'm looking to see if i can spy that queen they're starting to head that way yeah there they go it's always awesome just wait till they start fanning that pheromone in there and then they'll really go to it [Music] there they go but i really feel like this is a natural part of the process right here the bees occupying this is theirs [Music] but also again they have no clue where they're at we're about six or seven miles from the bee yard i took them from probably more than that actually and so they have they have no clue where they're at that's awesome oh there's a queen right there there she is yeah she has shrank down quite a bit now i'm not going to touch her at all last thing i want her doing is flying off we just want her to stay with the bees because let me tell you when she's slim like that after losing all the weight and from her not laying anymore she is a powerful flyer look at those bees go my first year as a beekeeper more of a bee have or honestly i let my only hive swarm and it was about twice this size and i got to watch this and that was the the moment that hooked me right there that i just had to keep doing this look at that one of the things that i would not do is i wouldn't have both of these right up next to each other this is where a two-way pallet or a four-way pallet is pretty inconvenient because if i was to shake both of these on a two-way pallet or even have an established colony on a pallet and this one's a legitimate colony and this one's a swarm you can cause fighting and aggression over that and especially during a dearth period i definitely wouldn't want those pheromones from another colony messing this up that's why i have them on single bottom boards as opposed to doing both of these on a two-way pallet now once both queens start laying then i can condense them down on a two-way pallet and i'm back in business we're gonna let this one just keep doing its thing and then let's uh let's do it again you know it's not a whole lot of fun at least to me i enjoy swarms look i i love swarms as far as catching them and doing this but when they're your own bees and you're trying to make a honey crop it's especially when you miss them man that's a big bummer but this part of it is a lot of fun let's get over here and do it again all right good bit of bees in there um mhm and you can see these bees up here they're kind of thing oh there they go they start they're starting to fan now yep they're starting to fan those wings and once that happens just right on in well this swarm is not taking its time about it a lot of swarms happening in kentucky and tennessee right now the early ones i believe primarily are from beekeepers hives not all of them but that's where these were from thankfully i don't think i've lost any more out of that yard it's a really nice bee yard and i've gone through the rest of my colonies since then and so we're we're caught back up i feel pretty comfortable where we're at still trying to find that queen it's not a big deal if we don't find her sometimes they slip in there pretty quick and you just miss it but it's it's always fun to see if you can do it i don't get it every time that's for sure now sometimes my queens are marked and that makes it a whole lot easier but again these bees are the perfect perfect age for drawing foundation out we are going to be feeding these things very thin syrup thinner than one to one and a lot of it we're going to get those foundations drawn out in the next few weeks once they get settled in a little bit i'll show you how they're doing drawing out the combs and then you can see if they stayed or not all right well we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Kamon Reynolds - Tennessee's Bees

Views: 66,380

Rating: 4.9356761 out of 5

Keywords: beekeeping, beekeeper, honeybees, bees, Kamon Reynolds, honey, how to make honey, beehive, swarming, swarm, swarm control, queen cell, queen cup, swarmtrap, swarm trapping, how to make a swarm trap, swarm trap, bee swarm, honey bee swarm, honeybee swarm, how to catch a swarm of bees, how to catch a swarm of wild honey bees, how to catch a swarm of bees in a tree, how to catch a swarm, catching wild bees, reset your swarms, bait hive, keeping your swarms from leaving

Id: T4-RyMu6atQ

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021