O.T. Bee Swarms

Swarms are caused when a colony becomes well established and is over populated. The queen lays several eggs that the workers prepare with royal jelly and several new queens are hatched.
One or more of the queens then leave and takes a sizable group with them. The bees that are swarming are very docile mainly because they are stuffed with honey for their migration. Swarming bees seldom are aggrerssive.

The main body stays close to their queen and scouts are sent out to find a new home.
The scouts return and communicate the direction and distance of the new home by body movements.
Then the queen and all of her hord fly there and establish residency. The easiest ways to catch a swarm is to lure the scouts into a beehive that full of frames with comb having a couple of frames that are full of honey capped by wax.
It is hard to resist a ready made home with a free meal!

The way I always did it though was to follow the swarm and wait for them to land and bunch around the queen. Using a soft brush with gentle strokes simply sweep the bees into a box. Have a hive ready to place at that spot and open the top and gently dump the bees into the new hive and close the top. They will stay and the stragglers will find their way.

Just make sure you scoop up the main body of bees as it will certainly contain the queen.

I had over 1500 colonies that I helped work for several years. Bees are fascinating creatures.

To be on the safe side ,I would wear bee protection, but swarming bees are the among safest to work. Just work slow and gentle and you'll be alright.

Hope this helped!

I plant buckwheat every year, and there is a commercial bee keeper about 1 mile from me. One sunny summer morning my wife and I were awakened at about 5:15 am by the sound of bees. I went to investigate. I had about 1.5 acres of buckwheat, and I judge there were probably close to 50 bees to the square foot. The sound of it also brought some neighbors, to investigate. The bees sure love the nectar from buckwheat. The beekeeper tells me he doesn't like the honey from buckwheat. It has an off flavour. He will just have to tolerate the flavour, as I have never seen a better way to crowd weeds out, than buckwheat. And a handsome green manure crop as well.

One of the the big honey makers there is Low Bush Blueberries, and the bees never leave even when harvesting the berries. I have operated blueberry harvesters some, and it would be nice to switch a/c on, close the cab up and forget the bees. However there is a need to communicate with the guy stacking boxes of blueberries on behind. Those bees would get in the cab, and every once in awhile you would see and operator opening the doors of the tractor and shooing the bees out with his baseball cap. I never was very successful at this. The guy who owned this operation could wave his cap like a wild man and never get stung. My approach had to be very graceful, might even say please.

The people who worked in the receiving and shipping sheds for blueberries actually had the worst time with the bees. The bees seem to love the fresh harvested blueberries.

From it's humble beginnings came a tool known as the blueberry hand rake, which looked like nothing more than your average dust pan with teeth spaced about 1/8" apart and about 6" long. This device had a handle on top, and the user would comb these teeth through the low blueberry plants allowing the berries to fall back into the dust pan portion. After a couple scoupes the user would dump these into a bucket.

With progress came the tractor mounted Blueberry Harvester. Many attempts were made on the development of this. The most sucessful to date is mounted on a 4x4 tractor. It is a cylinder device that combs through the plants as the tractor moves throught the field at speeds of 1 mph. The cylinder is mounted on the side of a 40 to 50 hp 4x4 tractor much like a side mount mower. A conveyor goes through the center of the cylinder taking the berries to a second conveyor running between the rear wheel and housing of tractor to a platform mounted on the 3 point hitch. At the point on behind where berries fall off the conveyor there is a squirel cage type blower which blows out most of the leaves, as the berries fall into 20 lb. plastic stackable boxes. The 50 hp tractors can go to about 60 - 20 lb. boxes before unloading to a truck. Some of these units have been mounted on larger tractors for use on steep slopes. The harvesting unit only takes a swath of 3.5 feet and you travel the field as you would mowing a hayfield. There has been a move lately to mount two of these units on one side of 100+hp tractors. They still use 4x4 and set rear wheel out quite wide on tread. One harvesting unit is mounted ahead of rear tire, just so front tire clears unharvested berries. The second unit is mounted beside the rear wheel and its conveyor goes to platform. In a good crop of berries it takes one guy behind per unit to handle the boxes of berries. He has to be a quite rugged individual.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The developer of this harvester was Doug Bragg Enterprises, type that in will take you to their home page. If you wish to read a bit more about the development of this crop, type in Nova Scotia Low Bush Blueberry. There is tons of info there. E mail me if you have questions.

I was in my late fifties when asked to run one of these harvesters. I had done just about every job known on tractors 20 hp to 150 hp. Looking back over the years I would have to say mold board plowing, corn planting and blueberry harvester have been my three favourite jobs with a farm tractor. The blueberry harvester although you only travel 1 mph, never got boring. The ground speed of that cylinder had to be kept slightly faster than ground speed of tractor. This process is all computerized, but it does require monotoring and making adjustments. A careless operator could waste valuable berries. This industry has taken over from Potatoes in Atlantic Canada as the most valuable farm gate crop. And 10 years ago it was called the lowly bluederry.

One big plus with this crop, it always has a sod. You can't plow it with anything. Bees have played a very big roll in this industry from day one. Most of these guys have become bee keepers out of necessity. I suspect there is not big honey yield from blueberries, but it does fit well with other crops in maintaining bees.