This is a photo of two swarm boxes I built. This year I was hoping to have a couple bee hives, but for multiple reasons it didn’t quite work out this year. So I built these swarm boxes and they will be hung up in trees to catch wild swarms of bees.
When a bee colony is of a sufficient size and under certain conditions the queen bee and about 2/3s of the colony will leave their hive in search of a new home. The remaining bees will raise a new queen to continue.
While searching for a new home the bees have a system of signals and a ‘quorom’ of votes that essentially decides the most desirable spot to move by something resembling a democracy (more so a democracy than most).
These boxes are designed to be especially appealing to bees. It is late in the season for us to be putting them up, but I hope to catch a swarm and let it live in the box for the season. Any late swarms probably won’t survive the winter, but having the bees inside the box and putting propolis in the box makes it more attractive to later swarms.
So for next year I am all setup to ensure that the bee project takes flight here. We will definitely have purchased bees, but also will hopefully have some native bees caught in these swarm traps.
You are more of a help to the community working on the nut butter operation so it makes good sense for you to defer setting up the hives. Did you have any luck with the swarm boxes? I never heard that term before. Dad