YES! The moment we have all waited for....OK...Well at least the moment I've waited for! :laugh:
SWARM #1 --- Understand, not swarm #1 of the year....BUT, FIRST SWARM EVER! :-D
Obviously, my efforts via "word of mouth" finally paid off....Got a call from a co-worker in the front office to tell me she had transferred a bee call to dispatch. I was on the phone with dispatch before they could drop the call and had them transfer the caller to me. I did a little better job with my questions and confirmed it was a swarm..."about 8 feet off the ground"! :)
Before I could get out the parking lot, I had two other co-workers call me to see if I had heard the call go out on the radio. LOL!
Anyway, got home, grabbed my stuff and headed that way...Of course, 8 feet turned out to be more like 16 feet! :shock:
Luckily from what I've learned reading this forum, I was fully expecting that and wasn't surprised in the least!
Ran a few different approaches over in my mind real quick, upon reflection, not sure I took the best or easiest route, but I think it all worked out.
Since I was near the top of a 10 1/2 foot ladder, I decided to suit up out of an abundance of caution. The plan was to gentle snip the limb, carry it down the ladder and place it in the box. However, it really didn't work as I had envisioned it. I was kind of stretching to reach it and the cutting of the limb kind of snapped back, causing me to lose the vast majority of the cluster.
I placed what i had in the box and I placed the box atop the ladder in the hopes they would be drawn to it. Bees started clustering mostly on my ladder so I put the bee vac to the test and was very satisfied with how it performed. :)
After vacuuming up quite a few bees I notice that the bees were tending to hang out around the exhaust of the vacuum and the bees in the box were headed out. Figured the queen had to be in the vac. I took the box off the ladder, opened the bee vac and dumped them in....Put the lid on but left a decent size opening on one end.
In no time it was obvious that they were all now interested in entering the box.
Video clip!After they all made it inside, I closed the lid, hung around and vacuumed up a few stragglers and headed home.
All in all, I think it went well.....Sorry for rambling on...But I'm I little on the fired up side of things. After all, you only get one first swarm! :-D