When it comes to honeybees, there's three things you can guarantee:

• Honeybees will produce honey, and as much of it as they possibly can;
  
• Honeybees will produce wax, which  they use to raise the new bees or to store all the honey they produce;
• Honeybees, if they feel like the hive is getting cramped, will swarm.  For a non-beekeeper a swarm of bees can be loud and unsettling.
  

Perhaps not well understood is, the hive can be full because the colony of bees has grown too large or the hive can feel full because the honey stores are full.  When the stores are full the bees have no work to do, prompting them to move to a new (bigger) home.  Honeybees won't sit back and relax because, genetically, they're programmed to work from the moment they hatch until their last flight.

When honeybees swarm, the queen bee stops laying eggs and goes on a diet to slim down ready for the flight.  When ready, she leaves the hive along with roughly half of the colony and they set off searching for a new home to move into.  The remaining half raise a new queen who, after going out on her mating flights, resumes the role of building the colony strength back up.


As previously mentioned, seeing a swarm can be alarming because there can be literally thousands of honeybees, all flying in one area, and with thousands of honey bees comes quite a loud hum which in itself can sound daunting.  The good news is, the bees are likely fairly docile when they're swarming because they'll have filled their honey stomachs with food for the journey before setting off.  Whilst this makes them heavy, it should still be remembered that their primary concern will be to protect the queen bee who will be with them.  If left alone, the bees should remain calm and will form a closed ball around the queen to keep her warm whilst the scout bees find a new home.

When you call us we'll assess where they are so that we can decide on what approach to take and what equipment we need to bring with us.  It some cases, we can simply scoop up the bees into a temporary home whilst we remove them but, in some cases, it's not possible to deal with them this way.  Where the location is more challenging we have a bee vacuum (which has a varied air flow) that we can use to extract the bees safely.  The varied air flow in our vacuum means we can extract the bees from difficult locations without harming them directly into a temporary home so that we can safely transport them away.

We NEVER use pesticides or any other method to euthanise bees.

What we can guarantee is, whatever is the situation, we'll discuss your options with you and will always present the options that least harms the bees.  Our aim is simple, remove your bees whilst at the same time minimising any harm to them.  Once we've collected your bees into a box, we can safely transport them to our apiary where we can put them into their new forever home.

Call us, it's free!

In most cases we don't actually charge for swarm collection because we're more concerned with making sure that the bees aren't misbehaving.  The best way to do this is to remove them from where they may be causing concern and put them somewhere where they can go about their usual business.

n.b. depending on location we may ask for a contribution to cover fuel costs for transporting them.