Yesterday at lunch I mentioned to Kamitani sensei that we had not received any calls about bee swarms lately, and last night he sent me an email telling me that he got a call right after I left to go home. We decided to go pick it up this morning.
The swarm was hanging off the roof of a carport next to a business in Nishijin, Fukuoka, Japan. Part of the bees were up above the carport roof on top, while the rest of them hung down on the underside of the carport roof. It was a loose swarm since the weather today is rather warm. It was somewhat in the shape of a heart.
I started out by trying to catch the bees in my small swarm-catching cardboard box, but I could almost immediately tell that the box was too small, so I asked the man from the business if he had a larger cardboard box I could use. He brought out a big Scotties box and I went to work. I am really glad he had the larger box because that was probably the difference between success and failure in picking up this swarm.
After getting most of the bees into the cardboard box and taping the lid shut (while leaving a small trap door open), the bees were not moving down to join the box very quickly, so I got up on the ladder again and swept clumps of bees into the lid of the smaller box and then set it down on the ground under the trap door of the big box. The bees in the lid then climbed upwards and went into the big box. I disturbed clumps of bees in the lid that did not move much by herding them with my bee brush to get them to climb up into the box. It worked pretty well.
When we finally got to the point where no more bees would go into the box and the number of bees coming back out of the box was about the same as the number going in (and most of the bees were inside the box), I closed the trap door, brushed the stragglers off and put the box in the car on the back seat.
After returning to the office, I dumped them into a waiting hive on the roof of the Agriculture Building at the Hakozaki campus here at Kyushu University. When I checked on them later, they had all gone inside the hive and many bees were making orientation flights and flying in and out of the hive. I will check them again tomorrow to see if they decided to stay in this hive box. I think they will.
Out of all the swarms of the native Japanese honey bees that I have seen here during the past 4 years, this is the biggest swarm I have seen. It was quite heavy compared to any of the others. I was really surprised by it.