Swarm Chasing!

Yesterday I spent all day riding around with a beekeeper, Mike. I met him through COBA. We started the day by inspecting a bee yard with three hives. The first hive had a lame Queen. She was not laying adequately. The second hive we opened seemed to have no Queen. It seemed that a worker bee had started laying in that hive. When workers start laying they lay only drone (male) brood. In the last hive we opened the bees were doing great there was nice brood pattern and they were clearly running out of space. Those last bees were even starting a new queen cell cause they wanted to swarm. This happens when bees get over crowded. We took the queen cell from that last hive and put it in the laying worker hive. 
After the hive inspections we drove all around central ohio. He had a list of different calls he had been sent on. We had two trap outs that were in trees and a cut out from a house. When you do a trap out you just get all the foragers and end up leaving the house bees, the Queen and all the structures inside the tree. In a house cut out you get to scoop all of it out. It turned out that Mike's ladder was too short and we couldn't reach either of the trees where the hives were. Then we drove an hour to get to this last house, with the cut out. 
When we got there it was raining. The house was clearly not currently inhabited, but being fixed up. No one was home. They had told him it was on the north east corner of the house. We waited out the rain. Then went up a ladder looking for any signs of bees in the northeast corner. Even after cutting away some of the eves there was no sign. So we looked around the house and on the north west corner I spotted the bees flying in and out. They were flying in and out right in between a coil of live power lines. There was just no way to get up there (two stories) on a ladder, and fiddle around with hive tools and power saws and get them out of there. Two hours on the road for nothing. That was the last call Mike had that day. 
We started driving back dejected. Suddenly Mike's phone starts ringing. Not five minutes down the road from his house, 45 minutes from where we were then, there's a swarm hanging on the side of some women's house. Speed limits stopped being a thing for Mike at this point. We got to that house to find this! 

The woman and her daughter were standing outside stairing at it like it was radioactive. That pile is about 4 inches thick in the middle, three to four pounds of bees. That means about 12,000 to 15,000 bees. Thats a lot of bees if you ask me. Mike and I got out the ladder and dawned bee jackets. My job was to stand under the swarm and hold the box as high over my head as I could. Mike climbed the ladder and used his hive tool to scrap the bees off the house into my box. Sophisticated stuff I know. The hole time they woman was asking us questions. I got to answer most of them and sound like I really knew what I was talking about. Little did she know this was my first time doing this. 

After, we got all the bees we took them back to the bee yard we looked at that morning. We pulled out the lame Queen and smashed her. Then we shook out most of the bees and dumped this new swarm in there. Before you get all worried about our killing all those other bees. We just killed her a few months earlier that nature would have. If she had not laid enough eggs and hatched enough bees by winter the whole hive would have froze. 

After all that excitement Mike and I went back to his house. He show me where he had some old beat up boxes and let me take two whole boxes with frames in it. I will have to pay for them some how at some point but until then I have a new hive to clean and fix up. Hopefully the next swarm we catch I will be ready for!