Last week I received two phone calls from government offices regarding people who had honey bee swarms in their yards here in Fukuoka. On Wednesday we got a call from an older lady who lives on the first floor in a high rise apartment near the airport. She had a swarm of native Japanese honey bees come to the cymbidium orchids blooming in a pot on her balcony. She let me come in through her apartment and onto the balcony. The bees were covering the blossoms and the side of the pot the orchids were planted in. She allowed me to take the entire potted plant with the attached bees with me. I put them into a cardboard box, put the lid on, and allowed the bees that had fallen off the pot to enter through the open trap door cut into the side of the box. The bees cooperated and entered the box fairly quickly and we were on our way. I gave her some compensation for taking her orchid plant and the bees.
When I took them back to my office and tried to put them in the hive box I had prepared and decided to install them into, they seemed to have other ideas, and after a short time, they began to form a cluster on the underside of the roof’s overhang up above the hive box. I decided to not bother them at that time, but to wait until the next day to try and put them into an empty hive. The fact that they did not stay in the hive where I initially put them bothered me and I worried a bit that they might abscond and I might lose them, so I tried to think of possible reasons why they did not stay.
One thing that came to mind was that the bottom of the hive was screened, but open, so the hive interior was not really dark. Thinking anthropomorphically, I wondered if it bothered them and they did not feel safe because it was not enclosed and protected enough. As a result of this thought, I decided to close the bottom off completely using a piece of wood, and to try again in the morning.
The building where I have the hives is a 6 story building, and when I arrived at work the next morning, I could see the cluster of bees under the overhang from the parking lot down on the ground where I was, so I knew they were still there.
I got an insect collecting net with an extendable handle and my protective bee gear and went up to the roof where I dislodged the cluster so it fell into the net, then I quickly dumped them into the prepared hive and put the cover on. This time they stayed, and are now working steadily, bringing in nectar and pollen and possibly water too.
The second call came on Friday, and I got my friend, Teruo Shiki, to come and take me to pick up a swarm of bees located in Aoba near Hakozaki (the university and my office are in Hakozaki so it was nearby). He had never seen a swarm of bees being collected, so he learned a lot by watching me. We found the bees about 2 meters off the ground on the trunk of a tree in a front yard garden. I held the cardboard swarm collection box I had prepared under the swarm and pressed against the tree trunk while I dislodged the swarm with a bee brush so they fell into the cardboard box. I then quickly put the telescoping lid on the box and placed the box on top of a ladder, as close to where the swarm was originally located as I could get it. There was still a great number of bees on the tree and of course many more flying in the air, so with my gloved hands, I carefully took handfuls of bees from the tree and held my open hands next to the trap door of the box. The bees in my hands quickly entered the box to join the other bees, so I assumed the queen was in the box. I did this several times because the bees did not seem to want to enter the box very quickly by themselves without encouragement and I wanted to hurry up the process. Finally most of the remaining bees took to the air and found the entrance to the box and started entering more quickly. It did not take much time after that for basically all the bees to go into the box except for one or two. At this point, I closed the flap on the small trap door (see photographs on the last post for what the box looks like) and we put the box in the truck and headed back.
This swarm I decided to hive at Shiki san’s yard, so we stopped by my office and loaded the hive from the roof into the back of his truck (along with my bicycle). It was so dark by the time we got back to his house that I decided to wait until the next morning to install the bees in the hive. We took a flashlight and decided where to locate the hive and which direction to face the hive entrance.
Early the next morning I went to his house and dumped the bees in the hive box. It is located under some trees in his garden where it will get some shade and filtered sunlight, particularly in the afternoons. The entrance is facing east. I pruned a small branch off the tree that was obstructing where I needed to dump the bees from, then after jarring the box once on the ground to make the bees drop into the bottom of the box, I dumped them into the top of the hive and put the lid on it. After that, I had to shake out the remaining bees.
I noticed that overnight the bees had already started building some wax comb on the inside lid of the box. It was a small piece about 2 inches wide and 3 inches long of perfectly white beautiful beeswax comb. Upon closer inspection, I could see it already contained a little nectar or honey that the bees had put into some of the cells, but I did not see that any eggs had been laid yet. Those bees seem to be O.K. with staying in that hive box too and started orienting and acting normally right away. I was very pleased with the outcome.