Having all these bees where I can look but not touch is driving me crazy. Even so, I think a healthy hive of wild bees should be left alone if they aren't bothering anyone.
The box where they live is rather small and, at the time this was written, the conditions were great for swarming. So a tree stand (the sort you can hunt from) was suspended in a tree to hold a medium box laced with lemongrass oil as a lure. Lemongrass oil makes an excellent lure (a few bees checked it out immediately after I set the box up) and the easy on the pocket book price makes my frugal heart happy.
And swarm they did. Can you spot them?:
A little help?:
And again. Here they are getting ready for more shenanigans:
They swarmed out a total of 3 times that I saw. Could I get to them? Heck no. I should have taken the first picture with something for scale. That swarm is at the top of an oak tree at least 60 feet tall. That was the way it went every stinkin' time. Did any of them so much as look at my bait hive. Heck no.
Meanwhile, I had broken my right foot and a toe on the left (I told you I was clumsy). All I could do was sit on the porch watching them fly away and try not to weep.
A man in my local bee keepers club uses a 4 or 5 foot tall pine tree fixed to a stake for a swarm trap. I have watched it work multiple times. I think he just cut down a young pine on the edge of his apiary and lashed it to a stake so he could set it up close to hives he knew were fixin to swarm. So simple and FREE.
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