its that time of year, where a beekeeper looks all around - not at the flowers, or pretty ladies - but for swarms. this one showed up on friday 4/15 - hanging on the garden fence. anything other than a swarm hanging off a horizontal branch, can be a challenge.
i approached this with the usual heavy dose of sugar water, generously sprayed all over the swarm. being that one cant rap the fence hard enough to kick-off a dramatic swarm drop into a hive i had to come up with a plan b.
once well soaked, i used the hive tool and scraped the bees into a cardboard lid and poured the mass of bees into the nuc hive. it took a few scrapes and the bees were in the hive. by evening time, the bees were all snug in their nuc hive and at 5 AM saturday morning, they were moved up to hive position #8 - filling up my apiary.
still looking for a few more good swarms - to combine with new swarms to get them going even more.
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