A beautiful Easter Sunday here on the Island and I get a swarm call (thanks to Lisa of Round Tuit Farms for the referral) about a swarm of bees outside an Oak Harbor home. I rush over and there’s a nice clump of bees hanging on some wisteria.
So take a moment to picture this. Bees as a “super-organism” populate when about half the bees leave the original hive and go off to seek a nice home. These bees first land on a tree, or fence post or anything really – and they “hang out” while scout bees go out and search for a new place to live. The scout bees some back and report the location of anything they find, other bees investigate and at some point, they reach a consensus and all of the sudden, they fly off straight to their new home.
The problem is that a lot of times, these “new homes” can be inside the walls of your home – or some other unfavorable spot (like what happened last year, when I had to help a homeowner cut open the walls of his house and extract the bees; see Bee Removal On Whidbey Island).
To prevent that, it is best to get these bees while they are in swarm mode – just hanging out on a branch or some other item while they wait for the scouts to find their new home.
To do that, I shake the bees into a bucket or other container and then shake those bees from the bucket into a new hive. As long as I have the queen in the new hive, the bees will raise their rear-ends and start fanning while releasing a lemon-like scent (Nasonov pheromone) which tells the bees to “come here”, orienting the bees to the hive.
Bees now in a hive in a nice new spot with lots of forage! 
If you see a swarm here on Whidbey Island or Fidalgo Island, please give us a call at: 360-720-4330 – I remove swarms for free!