A Swarm in May

Exciting news this morning, for me at any rate, I received an e-mail inviting me to add my name to the Leeds Beekeepers Association swarm list. This is a list of volunteers who are prepared to drop what they are doing and go and rescue swarms from gardens, shops, buildings wherever.
The requirement for going on the swarm list is that you have had at least 12 months beekeeping experience so I couldn't apply last year. Nevertheless I did get to deal with a swarm, when my own hive decided to swarm. I had already lost a swarm in May when half the hive took off and settled at the top of my neighbour's 60ft tree, all I could do was watch it in frustration whilst devising wildly impractical plans for trying to reach it. After a few days the scout bees had found a good site for a permanent home and the swarm took off never to be seen again.
As my initial nucleus of bees had cost me £100, I didn't like this, so took action to prevent them swarming again by splitting the remaining hive into two. Neither of the two new hives had active queens and the theory goes that the first of the queen cells to hatch in each hive will kill any other prospective queens and then on a fine day fly off, get mated and then return to the hive to spend the rest of her life laying eggs whilst the colony builds up around her.
So I was quite annoyed when my by now very small original colony decided to swarm again. Fortunately they landed in a hawthorn tree in my garden:

However I was not totally unaided, Oliver wanted to help:

Here again the theory says that bees are at their most docile when they are swarming as they have no hive to defend and they are in fact unable to sting as they have gorged themselves so much on honey in preparation for the journey that they cannot get their stingers in to the right position. Be that as it may, when I went up the ladder with a clothes brush to sweep them into a box, I was wearing the bee suit and I did still get stung on the hand. It was such a terrible summer last year that I don't think my bees had any honey stores to gorge on.
Once I had the queen and most of the swarm in a cardboard box, I tipped it up on a sheet below the tree and left it propped up for the bees I had missed, to come to find the queen.

 Then at night when they were all quiet and had stopped flying, I took the box down the garden to the spare hive and emptied them into it.
After that it was a waiting and wondering time, hoping that the virgin queen managed to get mated and start laying. It is recommended that they are disturbed as little as possible during this time, so I used to go and sit on a stone near the entrance to the hive and watch the foraging bees coming into the hive. If I could see pollen on the back legs, I felt reassured as pollen is used to feed newly hatched bees although it is stored as well. Oliver would come and join me watching bees, hence the photograph at the top of the blog.
Well, I was lucky in that by the end of the season all three hives were queen right, that is mated and laying. They were all small in size and amount of stores as would be expected given the poor summer so I fed them with a sugar candy I'd cooked up, rather like making crystallized toffee. All I can do now is cross my fingers that they make it through to spring.