Every spring, most bee colonies who are naturally cared for are swarming. Natural swarming is a joyful and healthy event for the bees: it revitalises the energy field of the colonies and the fertility of the queens.
When you install a new hive and want to welcome bees into it, there are different ways to proceed. If you are lucky, it can happen that the bees settle by themselves (there are ways to prepare the empty hives with special scents and intentions to make them attractive). Nevertheless, we observe that the bee swarms often prefer to choose places that already smell of bees, so if your hive is new, it might be useful to collect a swarm and inhive it.
These three short videos show different ways to collect natural swarms and transfer them into a Top Bar Hive:
Here, the swarm is collected on a tree:
Here, the swarm settles in a “swarm-attractor”, an old square box equipped with top bars, and is transferred some weeks later to the Top Bar Hive:
And here, the swarm had already settled on the wall of a barn, where it could not stay long-term. The video shows how we collected and relocated it: