Have you got a bee problem? Spring is swarm time. There are a few things you should, and more importantly should NOT do. Bees are normally quite docile, however this depends on the queen that is controlling the colony. If the colony has been escaped, or feral for a period of time, the colony can be quite aggressive. Unless you know for sure, caution is needed. Don't upset them! Bees are a vital part of the environment. Farmers actually pay to have bee hives placed in there crops to gain a better yield. In suburbia, bees pollinate fruit and nut trees, flowers, backyard vegi patches. If it grows, it probably needs a bee. So don't try to kill them. If they sense that you are going to hurt them, they will retaliate! There are better options. You can pay for a pest exterminator, but that is expensive and will damage the environment through both the insecticides and killing the bees. The best option is to have the bees relocated and rehoused. There are local beekeeper that will do this for you for little or no cost. There are contact lists maintained by beekeeping clubs, and the Queensland DPI. If you are on the Gold Coast and you have unwanted hives or want bee swarms removed, I can be contacted on 5561 8081 or 0410912044 Click here for a list of Beekeepers who will help you. Click here for the Qld DPI contact Click here for Bee Swarm removal Newcastle, Port Stephens, Maitland & surrounds Click here for Bee Swarm removal Melbourne Click here for bee swarm removal Maryborough Most swarms can be successfully captured, and re-housed to more appropriate surroundings.. Why do bees swarm? What happens is that the old queen bee leaves the hive with a large colony of her subjects when a new queen, one that the worker bees have raised in the hive, is about to emerge from her cell and make a challenge. By leaving with at least half the hive to support her, the old queen makes room for the new queen to build up the remaining hive to full strength, thus ensuring the continuation of the species, indeed its expansion. But for bee-keepers, this annual exodus of more than half of each hive is a nuisance for two reasons. For one thing, the departing bees eat up hugely prior to leaving and carry along with them large stores of extra honey from the hive to last them for their journey to a new home. Secondly, the departing bees leave a worker-depleted hive which now has to wait for its new queen to hatch, mate and lay some eggs to produce new bees. So, honey production slows to a trickle and it takes the hive a whole summer to build up to full strength again. Unfortunately, no-one has devised a method for preventing bees from swarming, only of making it less �€˜necessary�€™ by inspecting the hive in early spring and manually destroying any queen cells. But even so, when nature calls, bees swarm. Bees, when swarming, are a slow and ponderous lot. They cannot fly very fast because they are so laden down with their plundered cargo of honey. And when they first leave the hive they do not go very far because they are following their queen and her navigational skills are worse than useless. She wavers about, her loyal troops following blindly, until she finds somewhere convenient to stop. Having found that their leader has stopped, all the bees stop too and they �€˜cluster�€™, forming a large mass, all tightly clumped together. Almost immediately scouts are sent out to do the really hard work of looking for a nice new place to live. In a rural area this is going to be a hollow tree trunk, branch or stump. In town it may well be a chimney, a down pipe or a vent in the eaves or under the floor. Having found a home-sweet-home, the scouts return to the swarm and pass their information around. Suddenly, usually within 24 hours of clustering, the swarm breaks up, takes to wing and vanishes. They have gone to take up residence in their new �€˜hive�€™. Unfortunately in town this will result in more problems when the owners of the house object to sharing their residence with bees. In rural areas, swarming goes largely unnoticed, but in town it presents some difficulties! In general, people don�€™t take kindly to the sight of 25,000 bees hanging about on the clothesline or suspended like a great dome from the pergola and they ring the number for such matters and report that they are being harassed by bees. Meanwhile, for a bee-keeper to replenish the workers in their hives rather faster than the new queen can following the departure of a swarm, catching bee swarms and merging them into existing hives is the easiest way to keep bee hives productive. So bee-keepers usually agree to catch swarms and when a bee-bothered call is received by the relevant government department, the caller is advised to contact someone from a list of bee keepers who have agreed to catch swarms. At this point it is probably worth noting that once a bee swarm has established itself in a new home it ceases to be a swarm and becomes a colony. A colony of bees quickly becomes a honey gathering and storing entity with the bees foraging daily from dawn to dusk. Therefore it is only as a swarm that the whole potential colony of bees can be caught. Once they have become a colony they are almost impossible to retrieve short of cutting their branch off the tree and trying, by night, to smoke them out of it and into a hive box. The activity is a nocturnal one of course because during the day, most of the bees are out and about.