How To Catch Wild Bees | Homing Our Feral Swarm in the Woodland Apiary (Vlog)
Today is a very exciting day at Mountain Jewel. We have homed our first feral colony!
Last night Ini closed up the bees in their swarm box.
This is the first swarm we caught that was moved temporarily to our mentor's place. We did this to help the bees reorient to their new location. This morning we had the pleasure of moving our first swarm to their permanent home!
This is a fantastic example of allying with natural rhythms and cycles.
By simply understanding a little of bee biology, we are are building an attractive home that feral swarms are interested in. By inviting honey bees into our apiary, we are also selecting for healthy genetics and resiliency. All we are doing is building an attractive home that feral swarms are choosing to inhabit.
In this vlog, we share this process with you all.
We are overjoyed with our first successful swarm acquisition of the season and have officially established our natural woodland apiary. We moved the swarm box from our land to our mentor's place for 10 days and just last night brought them home. This was to ensure they didn't get disoriented when we moved them only a short distance from the tree they were caught onto the hive stand.
This is a feral or wild bee swarm meaning it is the product of the natural swarming instinct of a healthy bee colony.
It does not need us to survive and is the result of the natural process a healthy colony goes through as they outgrow their home. They heaven't been artificially bred or fed sugar or medicated, and are therefore healthier and more resilient.
Join us as we house the first feral colony in our woodland apiary.
For other posts on Catching Wild Bees check out:
Why Catch Wild Swarms
Hanging Swarm Traps
Catching a Swarm
Relocating the Swarm
How to Set Up An Apiary
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How exciting, congratulations! FUR'd (Followed, updated & resteemed)!
thank you! very exciting indeed :)
I have sent $2 SBD to upvote this post as part of my pay it forward minnow support initiative.. I hope this encourages you to keep writing amazing posts and making this world a better place!.
Thank you from me, the @ecotrain and @tribesteemup!
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aw thanks so much @eco-alex!! i love this new initiative!! thanks so much for leading the ecoTrain so well and all you do to support us on the platform so that we all can thrive. your efforts don't go unnoticed <3!!
Yay! They are home! This was such a cool series of posts about doing this. I am glad it went so well.
yeah, us too! what a blessing. 3 swarms already in our first year! woohooo!! thanks!!
Hey, just a quick question: will you be keeping them in the swarm box or transferring to a regular hive? Have been thinking a lot lately about how much of modern beekeeping - and the Save the Bees movement - is actually counter-natural and much more responsible for the current plight of bees than anyone seems to want to admit...
we'll be transferring them to a 19 frame layens hive. they could live happily in the swarm box for the year, but we want them to have roomy quarters. totally agree with your last statement. we're coddling non native honeybee strains that aren't resilient to their locale. i'm not even sure people are talking about that at all, but that's a great point. beekeeping with feral swarms is something i'm so thankful we've started to learn and practice as it seems to be the way forward into creating strong colonies!
Ooh very nice guys!’ Great work.. were also about to start a bee hive and are watching u! Xx
thanks alex!! this is definitely a great way to go. our mentor's website has a lot of good articles as well www.horizontalhive.com, and i guess the layens style that he is a proponent of is actually quite popular in europe, so who knows- perhaps you have a mentor near you? we've found it so helpful to have one in navigating the big wide world of bees :) best wishes as you establish your hive(s)! <3
This is so exciting!! Three swarms in such a short time, that is just amazing. I've loved following every moment of this journey, thank you so much for sharing such a wealth of information.
you are so welcome! leo, our mentor, edited the book keeping bees with a smile and i would recommend it. also, we're happy to answer any questions you have, hook you up via email with our mentor orrrr he does hold these awesome workshops (we went to one last fall) that you could venture to the ozarks to participate in (you could stay at our homestead ;) ;)) and you could learn a lot! people from all over the world come to these: in ours people from india, brazil, canada and more... :) just an idea ;)
Love this times a million. Have you ever seen the Eddie Izzard sketch about bees?
nooooo will have to look for it! i am totally in love with this! a dream come true and the first step of many towards a resilient apiary! honey! mead! elixirs! bees pollinating and thriving!! ahhhH!!!!
hahaha no flirting with the bees :) thanks for the laughs
No worries... it's our fave skit!!!
also you're up early!
Yeah a suprise as SOMEONE kept me up talking in the wee hours. Nah it's 8.45 now.. beards on, coffees brewing..
Omg hilarious... BREAD is on!!!
HAHAHA omg thought you were really making a good joke there. turned out i got 2 laughs for the price of one! ;)
This is so exciting. It will be fun to follow the progress of this first swarm. To actually see how native bees build their hive and produce honey. You'll bring the other two home in 10 days then? I'll be staying tuned for this adventure ox
it is SO exciting! we have another one we caught at a nearby river and we are thinking of getting it tonight! so perhaps by morning, we'll have 2 swarms in hives on our land!! we have another one nearby we'll have to take to leo's first for 5 days and then bring back. 3 swarms this year and plenty of time to catch more!! Yay !! <3
Wikipedia says that there are 20,000 species of bees. Is there anyway to figure out if a feral bee colony is native? I understand that bees coevolved with the local flora. Does cultivating native bees help the local environment?
hello @yintercept, thanks for joining us. feral bees indeed do mix genes with colonies that aren't native so the genes definitely are intermingling, but one thing about swarms is that they're usually more resilient as they are surviving without human interference. the genes will inherently be stronger. This helps the local environment as there will be more bees which equals more pollination and more productivity within their local ecoystem (more fertilization = more fruit set, etc). Honeybees aren't native to N America although they've been long since introduced here. "native bees" are usually referring to mason bees, carpenter bees , bumble bees, etc. These feral honeybees we're catching are a mix of introduced Apis melifera (honeybee) that have swarmed from kept hives and mixed with naturalized colonies. Does this answer your questions? thanks for stopping by!
We have Rocky Mountain Bee Plant and it attracts the most amazing selection of bees, making me feel sad that I know so little about the subject.
there's so much to learn!
Ok. So just a question for those of us un-wise in the ways of bees. Are bees territorial? Are you going to have any problem when your 3 swarms start living in the same relative area? btw this is really cool what you are doing!
great question. bees sometimes can "steal" from other hives and also bees can get disoriented. we will space them at least 20-25 ft to give them some space and also make different markings on the hives so there is no confusion when they return home. i mean, you see commercial bees in uniform boxes and really close together so it's obvious bees can survive like this, but they oftentimes can go into the wrong hive in these cases, share diseases (if they have them) and like i said steal, and compete to weaken other colonies. our mentor advised us with 20 ft spacing, markings and even facing the entrances in differing directions so we're going with it!! :)
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