How I got interested...

One day last spring someone came in the courthouse where I work and said that there were a swarm of bees on a pillar in front of City Hall. City Hall is across the street from my office so I looked out there and WOW! The pole was black instead of the normal reddish brown color! And the air was full of black dots zipping around. The curious thing to me was that all the bees were in such a concentrated area. I had to get a closer look! By this time a small crowd had gathered, so I walked down the lawn and across the street, still within a safe distance of course!

By the time I got my camera and got down there the resident swarm catchers (Bobby Mckee & Greg Drake) had already surveyed the situation and started catching the bees. This is what sparked my interest. I mean I had heard of people handling bees, but that was just a myth...right? Nope! As I became more and more intrigued, I began to ask questions. Like why is the bees concentrated in one spot? I found out that bees want to stay close to the queen, that is why they are crawling all over each other on that pole, they are trying to stay close to the queen.

That really led to the answer of another question how are you catch them/get them to go into that box?? Well once again the answer was The Queen. What happened was that Bobby Mckee found the queen in the swarm (finding ONE particular bee in the middle of all those bees, you got to be kidding me!! Like much other aspects of beekeeping it is more of an art than a science) and once he found her he gently placed her in the box. That is all it took, then the bees slowly started making their way to their queen. To say that a person will get every single bee in the box this way is an overstatement. A few stragglers will just have to be left behind.

Being able to see someone handle and manipulate those bees like that...I mean come on that is just too cool! I had to learn how to do that!! So I guess you could say it was love @ first sight! If you would like to know why honey bees swarm check this out.