# caught my first swarm



## limuhead (Feb 15, 2015)

Hi all,
I just started doing the bee thing not too long ago. I have a top bar hive I built from plans off the internet which is pretty standard, 4 feet long etc, etc. I have been getting some advice from a beekeeper that sells honey at the local farmers market and that has helped a lot! Anyway my beekeeper friend was in Florida when he got a call from the fire department about a swarm of bees close to my house. I went over and caught them in a cardboard box, took them home, and built a top bar style Nuc. All this happened in a period of about 4 hours after a long hard day at work. The Nuc is about 16" long, bars about 14" wide 11" deep, and 5" wide at the bottom. What I am curious about is how long should I wait to open it and check out how the girls are doing? The swarm I collected was about the size of a basketball and when I dumped them in the Nuc literally filled it up about 2/3 solid with bees. I was told to wait a few weeks at least but there has been a crazy amount of activity since I got them. There are bees coming in and out of the hive about every 3 or 4 seconds from sun up to sun down.
Thanks in advance,
Fred


----------



## GaryG74 (Apr 9, 2014)

Congratulations on the swarm capture!
A swarm that size can have your nuc filled with comb in just a few days. Are they bringing in pollen yet? That's usually a sign that they are settled in their new home. I try to leave swarms alone for the first week without much intervention, then just do short inspection without removing frames (I use Langs) as I look down between the frames to judge comb building progress. You won't be able to do that with a top bar, you'll have to pull one or two bars to see what they are doing. I would probably pull the back end bar and see where their comb is (quantity and size). You may have to move them into you regular sized hive soon. You should have a follower/solid bar to cut down the volume of space they occupy so they only have xx bars to work and not the whole hive. Don't give them too much space but don't let them get crowded or they may go into swarm mode and throw a swarm. Good luck and keep us informed.


----------



## limuhead (Feb 15, 2015)

There is tons of pollen coming in. I am going to build a new top bar hive tomorrow. We have had a lot of unseasonable rain as well as sun so right now there is tons of forage for the bees. The amount of swarms even made the local news, swarms everywhere around here now...


----------

