I had an amazing experience a few days ago: I caught a swarm of bees on my hand! Here's the whole story.
Snow White's colony threw another afterswarm as I was doing some outside work, so I went up to the bee yard to watch and see where they would land. The swarm was very disorganized, as can happen with swarms that have virgin queens. This was worse than I have ever seen it however, and the swarm hovered, with bees very widely dispersed, for 10 minutes or so at about eye-level with me. Bees started landing on bushes and on the ground in small clusters, but no one stayed put for very long. I noticed a larger cluster of bees on the ground, and with my bare hand I lightly touched the workers to get them to move aside to see if I could see a queen. Immediately they began to climb onto my hand. In a matter of 30 seconds or so I had about 30 bees in my hand. I knew I wasn't in danger of getting stung, and I didn't want to disrupt the flow of their movement because I was hopeful the queen was with them, so I decided to just sit and let them march onto my arm.
More and more bees joined the cluster on the ground and slowly marched up the hill towards me and onto my hand. I had to raise my arm as the cluster got larger, and after about 20 minutes or so, they started to feel quite heavy! The workers at the base of the cluster, the ones actually touching my skin, were very still, and were using the little hooks on their feet to hold the weight of their sisters. It felt like my hand was covered in the scratchy side of Velcro. My hand started to fall asleep from having to remain so still, but the cluster did allow me to very gently and slightly flex the fine muscles in my hand to keep it from going numb from a lack of circulation.
I flagged down my sister when she came outside, and she snapped some pictures of me, got a hive set up for me on an empty stand, and as she stood watching the bees, she happened to spot the queen climbing up onto the cluster I was holding! That was all I needed. I waited another minute or so to be sure the queen was well contained, and not just right at the bottom where she could easily fall, and then I carefully but smoothly stood up. I walked the few feet to the hive and lowered my hand into the box. The cluster immediately started marching onto the frames and the floor of the hive, and once the queen left my hand, some of the bees began Nasonov fanning. Once most of the bees had left my hand, I gently shook off the rest. I got them another box of frames and closed them up.
The question will now be if the queen, who I've christened Queen Belle, is a good enough flyer to mate. I still don't know why she ended up on the ground when the swarm issued. Did she just have some sort of mid-air collision and get knocked to the ground? Or is she unable to fly for some reason? I gave the colony a frame of eggs, just in case they need to replace her, and because there is of course nothing better to convince a swarm to stay put than a frame of babies to tend to.
