I never get tired of experiencing a swarm of bees, it’s an absolutely awesome sight and sound. (Turn on the volume!). This swarm of bees was captured at Nambour, Queensland, Australia.

This is a great example of why I always try to find the queen when removing swarms. I got call to remove the swarm that had settled in a palm tree the day before. I did a fairly straight forward swarm shake into a bucket, dropped them on a white sheet in front of the hive, found and caged the queen and watched them match into the box.

During colony founding, a portion of a colony’s workforce (the “swarm fraction”) departs with the old mother queen in a swarm while the remaining workforce stays with a new daughter queen in the parental nest.

They were just about all in the box when all of a sudden they decided that they didn’t really like this box and started pouring out, all 20 to 30,000 of them. (Maybe they didn’t realise that the queen was in there because I has filled the box with frames of recently extracted frames which would have smelt strongly of another colony). Within a couple of minutes the box was almost completely empty, apart from a couple of bees and the queen in her cage.

This is where this video begins. With the swarm airborne but queenless, I opened the lid of the catch box and put the queen cage on the top of the frames and just had to wait for the swarm to realise that they weren’t going anywhere without their queen. The queen releases powerful pheromones which can influence the way in which the colony behaves. In this case the queen pheromone acts as a magnet to the swarm forcing it to return to her and the catch box.

After a few minutes the swarm started to return and within about 20 minutes all was in order again, bees in the box for a second time, this time collectively fanning their nassanoff pheromone to further consolidate the new home for this colony.