Swarm outcome, sort of.

We are apparently bad as a couple at swarm capture

I climbed a ladder, cut the branch with the swarm on it

slowly

gently

painstakingly

patiently

Got the branch down to the ground.

Then i found the queen in the swarm and just had to get a closer look. She crawled on my clippers and then she flew away

That's right, she flew away.

So for the uninitiated, when the queen flies away, the bees go find her. or go somewhere else, but they don't stay where you put them.

In this case it doesn't seem like they went to the new hive (but it's hard to tell), but at least 4-5 lb of them rejoined the current hive, so it wasn't a total loss.

Perhaps the rest landed in the new hive we set up. No scale on that one so it's hard to tell :)

This graph tells the tale:


You can see the drop where they leave, a couple hours of normal nectar delivery, then a faster increase in weight where they start rejoining. Just at that point is where the branch was tapped to dump the bees on the new hive.

-tmk