Today I lost my collecting a Swarm Cherry. Up until now, I had never seen a swarm of bees up close and personal.  I had gone to the orchard just to do a cursory check on my bees, because we have had some very stiff gusts of wind, and it is always possible that the hives could get blown over.

 I wondered down the row of hives at what I thought was a suitable distance, as I hadnt put my bee suit on, only to walk right through a mass of bees in flight.  I stopped dead in my tracks and try to work out which direction they were flying in, there were too many for it just to be bees returning from foraging.  I turned my head and there almost next to me was a vast swarm of honey bees hanging from the elbow on one of the ancient apples branches.

Bees were literally dripping onto the grass below as the wind gusted around and knocked them from their giant swarm. There were a lot of bees, and I can only imagine it was the first swarm that year from a hive, although it would appear it wasn't a swarm from mine or Simon's hives.   What to do next? I couldn't leave them there, it had been raining on and off all day long, heavy torrential showers and an icy wind. They wouldn't survive long where they were and I couldn't stand the idea of thousands of dead bees if they were left overnight without cover.  It was one of those times I wished I used a mobile and had one with me. I could have phoned for reinforcements from someone more knowledgeable than me.

I leapt back in the car and drove home as fast as the field track and the country lanes would allow, called Simon in the vain hope he might be home from work, and started lobbing old bed sheets, a nucleus box, stand, and frames  and some bee food. Simon was home and would meet me at the field.

So I dashed back to the field, suited up - Simon and his daughter had just arrived too, and he then proceeded to show me how to capture the swarm. We lay the sheet beneath where the swarm was hanging from the tree, and then placed the empty nucleus box directly below the swarm, and began to sweep the bees of the branch with our hands, guiding them to the box below. They ball in a huge ferment of bodies, deep inside the Queen bee remains, so we just hope that the Queen bee has fallen in the box when all the other worker bees fell in.

Once the majority of the bees where in the box, I added some frames, and we replaced the lid. I then went down on my hand and knees and scooped up smaller clusters of bees from the grass and placed them on the sheet.  The bees soon got the idea that the box was a safe cosy place to be and started to signal their sisters to come in too.

You can see a cluster of bees around the entrance hole of the box, and you can see other bees making their way towards it in a trail of bees, encouraged by their sisters to do so. I stood and watched a while and marvelled again at the organisation of a bee colony and the power of the 'Hive Mind'. Later, at dusk I shall move the box full of bees to a more sheltered spot, and hopefully in a day or so I shall feed them and eventually place them in a new hive of their own,  alongside my existing bees.

I came away feeling very excited and very happy.