How to Set Up a Swarm Trap

You can take a "wait and see" approach to catching swarms and let Fate (or your neighbor, the town highway crew, or your local swarm catcher hotline) alert you to any opportunities. Or you can take a more proactive step and put out swarm traps and try to improve your odds.

At their simplest, these boxes are about the size of an ordinary 10 frame deep box. You can easily re-purpose an old brood box with a temporary base and top cover. Set it up with a reduced entrance of about two square inches. Fill it with old drawn comb, but none with honey in order to forestall robbing. Since the box may not attract a swarm quickly – or at all – don’t waste your best comb by exposing it to wax moths. Bees aren’t wild about a box of foundation, so using at least some drawn comb is important. Research has shown that the preferred size of cavity is between 40 and 60 liters, and a deep box is 43 liters.

While bees may adopt a box that’s near the ground, the higher it is, the more attractive it will be to swarm scouts. But remember, a deep box placed high in a tree may be impossible to safely collect if it does catch a swarm.

A useful platform for a swarm trap that doesn't damage trees is a hunter's deer stand. You can safely raise and lower the box from the stand, and many of them come with attached ladders which makes them easy to visit. Be sure to attach both the stand and the box safely to the tree. Sometimes attaching the deer stand to the tree upside down provides a larger flat area to rest the box. A tree at the edge of the woods, with a south-facing entrance out over an open area is ideal.

If you want to increase your odds of attracting a swarm, you can add a swarm lure or a little bit of lemongrass oil to the box.

If your goal is to offer a last-ditch opportunity to catch swarms from your own hives, place the stand at least 750 feet away from your bee yard. But if you hope to catch swarms from your neighbors, place it closer to your yard. Your bees will usually fly farther away to find a new location, and your hives will attract swarms from more-distant yards that will home in on the smell of honey and beeswax that surrounds your bees.

Do swarm traps work? Yes, they do, but sometimes it takes a beekeeper several seasons to find their local sweet spot. Some sites are just better than others from a swarm scout’s point of view. Once you find that place, in order to preserve the same environment from year to year, take care not to make changes, such as clearing around it or cutting branches. Productive swarm locations are as closely-guarded secrets as good fishing spots.

You only need to check the trap once a week, or so. If a swarm moves in, there’s no urgency to move it immediately. Once they’ve settled down to raise brood, they aren’t going to abandon it. But don’t leave a newly-arrived swarm up in the tree for too long. The box will become too heavy to get it back down to the ground.

Plan ahead so that you have an entrance you can easily close up in the evening after all the bees are inside. Return at dawn, and get the hive out of the tree and move to its new home. As soon as you can, get the bees out of the trap box, on to better-quality comb in their permanent hive.

Consider moving them to a temporary quarantine yard (unless you know the bees came from one of your own hives). Read more about the value of a quarantine yard here.

If moving the bees from the trap location to their new home is a distance less than a couple of miles, consider using the techniques described in this article here to move the trap with less loss of oriented foragers.

READ MORE ABOUT HONEY BEE SWARMS