Getting Swarmy | Live Free or Die
It's a good-sized swarm. God, here they go! Jesus, look at them all! They're still coming out of the entrance; that's crazy! It's honey season in the mountains of North Carolina. Homesteaders Tony and Amelia are banking on a major harvest this year.
"I can really smell the honey!"
"Yeah, I know! It smells like honey everywhere right now."
"I want them to start looking for a new home before we catch them."
"Wa, that if you look up towards the sun, you can see them swarm when they are ready to propagate themselves. So they'll take their population of, let's say, 10,000, and half of them will leave with a new queen."
"I wonder if the queen's out yet. I'm watching for her."
"They go out, find a new location to live in, and they build themselves a new house in hopes that next year they can have a swarm and do the same thing."
"I think she's going to land right in that tree."
"Yeah, that's the spot! She must be up in there somewhere."
"There they go, they're zeroing in on it! Oh, it's almost landed! That's a good size one!"
"So once we see them swarming, the plan of action is to get an empty hive box. There's this hive—get up into the tree where they've swarmed into and knock the swarm into the new hive. Every minute is a minute that the scouts are looking for a place to move to, so the clock's ticking once they leave their mother colony."
"Okay, uh-oh! Oh, oh my God! We have two swarms happening at the same time in the same tree! Two swarms in one tree? I've actually never seen this before! Twice the bees, twice the risk."
"Yeah, well, let's get this one first."
"Yeah, the two swarms are right up against each other, so this is a little sketchy. Up we go! One big risk is that we shake one branch, and it shakes the other branch and the other swarm falls off and lands on one of us."
"Can we go to your left just a little bit?"
"If something goes wrong, like if they fall on your head or they fall on your body or they fall anywhere and just get really upset, that's like thousands of bees all stinging you at once."
"You going in very close? When you shake, you do one really hard shake, okay? And that helps to ensure that the queen comes off—she's in the middle."
"Okay, got it, 2, 3!"