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

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 […]

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

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.

Although honeybees can swarm from the hive at anytime, they tend to swarm most during spring. Sometimes honeybees swarm when they believe they have outgrown their hive. However, other times there is nothing that you can do to prevent swarming from happening. The bees simply have an instinctual desire to create another colony. Here are some tips […]

Capturing swarms is a very exciting way to get more bees for your apiary and it’s much easier than you may have realized.  The reason that it is generally easy is because when bees are swarming and have clustered themselves on a low branch in a tree or bush, they only have one thing on […]

Swarm Season Back when my wife and I first started keeping bees, everything was fine and dandy until swarm season came along. Since we were only keeping bees for two years, our experience with swarms was not much at all. During the first year of keeping bees, we only had two hives and never noticed if they had […]