Swarm Season 2026

Swarm season 2026 is quickly approaching. In our pre-spring hive checks, we've found capped drones. This means the colonies are prepping the boys for mating season. The drones have to mature before the colonies start raising swarm queens. Once the swarm queens are ready to emerge from their cells, the old queens and half of the colony will swarm out of their hives. I think we are about 3 weeks away from our first swarm calls.

When a swarm moves out, the first leg of their move will be from 20-200 feet. At that point, the bees will make sure the queen has made the short trip and scout bees will take off searching for their new home. Once a suitable location is found the swarm will drop and move in short hops, resting with each hop. The bees will rest when the queen tires from flying and wherever she stops: a tree limb, car, mailbox, bicycle, trampoline or even a barge going down the Mississippi river.

Those rests last from 2 hours to 2 days. When they are clustered up, this is the best time for us to capture the colony and move them into one of our hive boxes. Here is one of our swarm captures from last year.

I'm spritzing the swarm with sugar water.

This swarm came to us from Collierville, TN. The sugar water serves three purposes. It cools the bees if it is it outside. It feeds the bees if they are hungry. It gums up their wings making it hard for them to fly away.

Pruning some of the limbs out of the way for a cleaner shake of the swarm (you'll see).

It is vital that we capture swarms whenever we get these calls for 2 reasons: 1) Three out of four swarms fail; they die. We can provide safe hives, a home for them. We can provide supplemental food if they need it. We can also replace their queen if the old queen is unable to start laying again or died during the swarming event. 2) Because we have fewer hollow trees in urban areas, there's a high possibility that the homes they find may be the walls or ceiling of your home. In most instances, swarms are FREE pick ups. Removing an established hive from residences and businesses is NOT free.

Bringing up a portable hive, a nuc box

A keen sense of balance is helpful when climbing ladders with anything in your hands. Add to that tens of thousands of bees at head level and balance is imperative. Tripping, falling, or flailing are not multiple choice options on this test. Most of the time swarms aren't this convenient. Once in place, I can sit straddle of the ladder to capture this one.

The SHAKE

The shake is probably the most dramatic way of capturing a swarm, but it works well. The goal is to shake the limb so the majority of the swarm falls into the box.

A second shake to remove stragglers.

After the second shake, I added 5 hive frames with wax coated plastic foundation, then closed the lid of the nuc box. Normally, I'd move the box to the ground to gather in the bees crawling around down there, but those bees had already taken flight. In this instance, the box was placed on the ladder where I was sitting. There is a small, closable, entrance in one end of the nuc box. I left it open and left the box on the ladder to gather in the bees who were flying around their former Rest Stop.

The boxed swarm

At this point, the box has been brought to the ground. The queen was in the largest clump on the lid. With the swarm in the box, we closed the lid and bagged it up for transfer to the apiary.