Misbeehaving...

I have a stack of old beekeeping kit by the back of the house, that I am slowly working through cleaning and bringing back into use. Mostly honey supers that need to go on my hives in the next few weeks.

This morning a swarm moved into the stack, uninvited. Yay for free bees. But now what do I do? They don't have a floor or a roof, and are in a box that I need for something else. And they are literally outside the back door. It's not a BAD problem to have, but it has rather thrown my plans for the day into a spin.

What a lovely problem to have! You'll have far more ideas than I as to how to cope with this. Do you have a clean spare hive they can move into? I gather you can get bees to migrate into different parts of a hive for harvesting. Do you want to keep them, or do you have a beekeeping friend that might want a new community?

Time for plan Bee?

I had the opposite problem a couple weeks ago. A colony absconded. First time for everything I guess. The weird thing is I might have witnessed part of that. Was in the yard watering baby plants or something & heard a couple of bees right next to my head. When I looked up there was a couple hundred bees passing by directly overhead. I think they wanted to say good bye.

I imagine you don't want the hive where it is now and using the "2-foot or 2-mile" rule, this hive will need to be relocated some distance for a period of time.
Do you have room for them in your apiary?

I'd wait for nightfall for all the worker bees to return to the colony & cluster.
In the meantime, find a LARGE Rubbermaid container (approx 18" wide x 24" long x 18" deep) and a framed window screen large enough to cover the container (if you can't find screen, just use the rubbermaid lid).
Once they are settled down for the night, spray them with some sugar water and tap them into the container.
Then place the window screen over the container to trap them, this way they can still get air and you can see what they are doing. You might need to place  couple of small boards across the screen to keep it in place.
They should be fine like this for a few days, just keep them cool & dry and out of the sun. Maybe mist the screeen with some sugar water to keep them hydrated.

Hopefully, this should buy you enough time to get ahold of the stuff you need to move them to their new home.

All sorted without too much misadventure.

I was able to rustle up enough spare kit to make it work.

It was a reasonably large swarm I think. They were spread right through three medium langstroth boxes. Unfortunately these were boxes that I absolutely needed to take out of service and clean. Likewise with the frames they have chosen to settle on.

I set up the spare floor and boxes next to the stack and went through frame by frame transferring them over. I was able to give each frame a thorough scrape down before putting them in their new box - the colony they had come out of previously was rather over the top about building propolis everywhere.

I ended up forcing them down from three medium boxes to two mediums. I’m leaving them there today, and early next week I will transfer them to my apiary in town.

My remaining problem is that I need to get them working in a deep box, on deep frames. I’m going to need to add that underneath quite soon and maybe feed them to draw it out sooner rather than later. And I still would like to take these super frames away and replace them. I can probably do a few at a time, or let them finished the whole box of honey and take that away when ready.

Nice problems to have honestly, but it did rather mess up my plans for the day yesterday!

Pete Podurgiel wrote: I imagine you don't want the hive where it is now and using the "2-foot or 2-mile" rule, this hive will need to be relocated some distance for a period of time.
 

In general moving freshly hived swarms is not problematic. At worst you have a few stragglers who drift back to their original hive.

This is old now, but at soon as you can, move the medium frames they are laying on, and put them in a deep box, surrounded by deep frames, then shake the bees into the deep box.  They will draw comb on the bottom of the medium frames and make them deep,  

I always make my brood box a medium over a deep with an excluder above it.   Helps keep things in order, and having both sizes of brood frames is helpful when making splits and so on.