Our next door neighbor is quite the urban farmer. He has a nice garden of vegetables and berries, 4 chickens who live in the Hilton of chicken coops, and 2 beehives that produce the best tasting honey I've ever eaten. Seriously.
Just over a week ago, he added a new honey super to one of his hives. That small change was enough to send the bees into a major tizzy. They swarmed...in our backyard. It was like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. I took some photos of the clusters, and it was fascinating to watch my neighbor's retrieval of his bees. He basically cut the branch they were on and put it in a box, left the box there for awhile to encourage the rest of the bees to cluster there as well, and then took the whole thing back to the hive. Even after he removed the box, there were still 2 smaller clusters left. One by one, they figured out where to go, but getting the entire hive back home took several hours.
He later told me that when he added the super, he didn't check for a swarm cluster when he added it. I guess beekeepers can tell bees will swarm before they actually do--as long as they know what to look for.
Anyway, here are the photos:
Crazy, huh?
