Post date: May 04, 2015 7:45:48 PM

In the minivan with the wife and boys and a Bee-chball in the trunk too!

When I get a swarm call I make every attempt to size up the swarm situation before I head out to hive it. I typically want to find out how high off the ground it is and roughly what size the swarm is. How can you tell how big a swarm is? Count each bee? Customers are probably not going to be crazy about that method. What I do is ask what size the swarm is relative to objects everyone is familiar with. In this case I asked the lady who called if the swarm is the size of a football or more like the size of  a basketball. Usually swarms fall somewhere in that range. She responded that it's probably more like the size of a basketball but she didn't want to get close enough to really tell. 

Well, I jumped in the X and drove over. When I arrived and went back to the swarm I was pleasantly surprised to see it was HUGE! I should have included a beachball as a size comparison option. Look at the size of this beauty!

After I hived it I had to come back after dark to take it when there was no activity outside the hive. Man, that was a heavy hive! It felt like it was at least 50lbs. No kidding. The best part was when I was driving home. I had this gigantic swarm in the back of the minivan. My wife and my two boys were all buckled in with me as I was driving down the road when I started laughing and turned to my wife and said, "Five years ago did you ever envision you and the kids would be in a minivan with me and a big swarm in back too?!!" Haaaa haaaaaa! It was so funny. Even funnier was it was actually her suggestion to just pick up the swarm on the way home from dinner with friends. You just never know the crazy things you'll do and think nothing of it once you get into keeping honeybees!