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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

My dad and sisters are beekeepers. They run around all year to capture swarms. First, they try to capture the queen and mark her, then keep her extra safe in a special cage. Then they have a "bee vacuum" which is basically a shop vac hooked up to a bucket, both with a really low flow rate to avoid injuring the creatures. Most of the time, it's an entertaining process and the bees are as gentle as flies.

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> They run around all year to capture swarms.

There may be a difference in certain regions, but usually swarms are a spring thing, with another small reoccurrence in autumn. Mid summer is quiet and winter has none.

This relates to the times at which a queen can mate - there are no male drones in winter (the females kicked them out!) and so any queen that hatched would be a virgin, and couldn’t lay.

Sometimes swarms will occur due to bees absconding to get away from High levels of disease. I have never seen this but high levels of varroa can cause it.

The ones in the "off seasons" are usually very aggressive from what I've heard. They typically ran away from home to break away from some environmental stress I've been told? I'm not a beekeeper :) Just repeating what I've heard

This must be somewhere warms and with very mild winters?

NZ is lucky to have fairly easy going bees - this doesn’t mean that they are all friendly, just that Africanised bees are so much worse. There are accounts of them flying into smokers and putting them out. It’s all rather intense.

Kansas in the midwest. Depends on what you mean by "Mild" haha. We had snow in October, followed weeks later by 90degf temps. Very wide swings.

Our friends had a bee swarm show up in one of their trees this summer after a big storm. Their neighbor happens to do beekeeping, so he came over and helped them set up a hive for the swarm.

I think they still have the bees. Haven't heard much about it lately.

Can you elaborate on "most of the time"?

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