Did a swarm of bees choose your house or your yard as a destination to start a new colony? Give us a call quickly, and we’ll come and catch them.
During the summer months, bees tend to swarm. It is their natural way of procreating: The old queen leaves the hive with a good part of the worker bees and they go fins a new place to live. The bees that are left behind in the hive proceed to make a new queen form the eggs that are already in the hive. In this way, bee populations naturally multiply.
From a human perspective, swarming hives are not desirable, neither for the beekeeper, nor for the land owner where the swarm lands. Hives that swarm make little honey for the beekeeper, and most people are not too chuffed to have a colony of bees move in on their property. Therefore, beekeepers try to pre-empt swarming with appropriate management techniques, like splitting hives that are planning to swarm. However, it is not always possible to predict the swarming of a hive, nor do the management techniques always work as intended. We are dealing with nature, after all.
Should your property get visited by a swarm of bees, don’t panic, just give us a call and we’ll come and catch the swarm. In fact, tradition has it, that a swarm of bees brings good luck to the home owner where the swarm lands!
Bees are usually very docile when they swarm, meaning they are unlikely to sting. So even though a swarm of thousands of bees is an impressive sight, it is not particularly dangerous. Don’t go mess with them, but don’t be afraid either. Just call a beekeeper quickly, because time is of the essence in swarm catching. Often the swarm collects on a branch of a tree or something like that, while the scout bees are out to find a new home. This can last minutes or a few hours. This time window is the best opportunity to catch the swarm.
Once the swarm leaves and moves into someone’s chimney or under a roof structure or into a hollow wall, now we’re talking about swarm removal, which is a much more difficult problem to deal with. Therefore it is all the more important to try to catch bee swarms before they move into a building.
Currently, we only provide swarm catching as a free service in Lieto, Turku and Aura. We do not currently provide swarm removal. Swarm catching means we catch swarms that have not moved into a built structure yet. We do not currently have the resources to perform swarm removal from buildings.