I caught a swarm!

I wish I had gotten pictures or videos...My beekeeping mentor texted me early Sunday evening that he'd been contacted about a swarm near the house of a woman we work with.  Turns out she lives less than a 5 min drive from me here in Niceville.  

We headed over there and it was a smallish swarm that was on one of those locked green electrical boxes you see around.  James had brought a bee vacuum, but they were so concentrated that we decided to just scoop them into the bee box I brought.  Fortunately, it has some old drawn out frames with comb on them.  We laid the box on it's side and scooped about 3 handfuls of bees into the box.  The funny thing about swarms is generally the bees won't sting.  Bees sting to defend their hive, and swarms don't have a hive (yet), they're looking or heading to a new place to live so you can just pick them up with your hands (gloved of course, I'm not that stupid).  But after we scooped those bees into the box it was amazing.  The rest of the bees started to literally crawl from the electrical box into the bee box without any other prompting.  I knew from reading and videos that the bees would follow the queen, but seeing it firsthand was awesome.  Even though we were fairly sure we had the queen in the box, we set it right side up and inspected the frames one by one, and sure enough we found her, big and orange and gorgeous.  So we put the lid on the box, opened the entrance and set it near the remaining bees on the electrical box and told everyone in the area to just leave it be and I'd be back to collect the box in a bit.  An hour an a half later I came back and the electrical box was clear and my bee box was buzzing!  I closed up the entrance, put the box in a nice mesh bag that gives ventilation to the bees but doesn't allow them to escape and loaded them into the truck.

After I got them home, I took the box out of the mesh bag, and put it out by the new hive out back, gave them a jar of honey to eat and will move them to the new hive probably Friday.  It was a great new experience, and as they say, "You never forget your first" ;)