GRIT Editor in Chief Hank Will shares an extremely humbling experience and the visual beauty that accompanies a heart-shaped swarm.

Bees are expensive and you don’t want to lose the swarms that come off your hives and hopefully catch others to increase your population. For an investment of about $25 in materials with scrap wood, paint, flashing, and lemon grass oil, I ended up with three additional hives with very little effort.

If you want to increase your chance of successfully attracting a swarm, you can add an attractant to your bait hive. Lemongrass is very similar to the queen bee’s scent. Honeybees find the mixture of lemongrass and beeswax irresistible. Lemongrass Swarm Lure Recipe Yield: 3 ounces Ingredients 2 tablespoons beeswax 1/4 cup olive oil 40 […]

Capturing a swarm from your hive or from others is an essential skill that every beekeeper should learn

When swarm season comes, you never know when you’ll get the call for bee rescue and there’s no worse feeling than missing the opportunity to catch a swarm because it left before you arrived. That’s why I always keep a swarm catching kit in my car! Read on to find out what to include in your own kit […]

Catching a swarm is one of my favorite parts of beekeeping. Even though my phone rings off the hook in spring with live bee removal requests, I still feel a thrill when someone calls about a swarm. Most beekeepers love to catch swarms because they are docile and easy to remove. But, even the most […]

Honeybees, in a sense, reproduce on two levels. There is the actual reproduction of single bees; the mating of the queen, egg laying and rearing of young. This is one kind of reproduction. But there is also the reproduction of the hive itself. Without swarming, the first beehive in the history of time would still […]

Catching a Swarm Sponsored By: Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Shane Gebauer, president of Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, demonstrates how to capture a bee swarm with the Hipps Swarm Retriever and install it in a super. Knowing how to catch a swarm is important both for capturing new swarms you want to add to your beekeeping […]

Swarm season!! It will be here before you know it and are you ready? It is still winter and you aren’t doing a lot in the bee yard. But there are things that you can do to get ready for swarm season in the spring. If you keep bees, you more than likely will have […]

Swarming is a good thing—really! And naturally-mated queens will give you the best chance for a thriving, surviving hive.

For the past hundred years, we’ve been keeping bees according to what works best for beekeepers. What would it look like if we began putting the bees’ desires and needs first? It looks something like this…

A thing of beauty-perfect teardrop swarm   Swarm forming on branch As a new contributor to Keeping Backyard Bees, I have lots of swarm stories from 20 years of beekeeping. Averaging between 2 and 4 hives each season, I have certainly seen my share of mass exodus of carefully tended bees that decide to look for a new […]

Catching a swarm is a total blast. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of getting some wild bees for free. You just gotta get a little courageous and suit up to your comfort level and go get ‘em. Here’s a neat little tip that might just get you a few extra bees this spring using some items that you may have in your garage.

April in north Georgia means swarming season. I tried for about three years before I finally caught my first swarm last year. I put one of my nuc boxes up in a Bradford pear tree about 7 feet off the ground and put some lemongrass oil on it in mid-March. I caught a swarm in it about a month later. But I failed many times before.

In this post, I wanted to pass along what has worked for me and what has not so far.

What exactly is Bee Bearding? Is it: A. When a bee collects pollen under its chin resembling a human beard? B. When bees gather outside the hive entrance in a shape resembling a beard? C. Bees who are exceptionally fuzzy? D. Hipsters who keep tiny beehives in their beards? If you answered B then you’re […]