How not to catch a swarm of feral honeybees
... As the spring progresses, I'm continuing to get calls about swarms of feral honeybees. This morning, I turned down a request to remove a colony of bees from someone's walls. (I don't have the skills to open up walls, remove bees and honeycomb, and then restore everything once the bees are gone.) I did, however, drive up to the Berkeley hills, to see if I could help remove a swarm from a backyard apple tree. This swarm was huge, the largest I'd ever seen. Everything seemed pretty straightforward. I'd give the branch a sharp shake, and the bees would fall into the wooden hive-box that I'd set up on an upended garbage can. A shower-curtain-liner would catch all of the loose bees, and would serve as a wrapper for the hive-box, when I put it in my car. Sounded simple, right? Well, as you can see, the bees did not land neatly in the box, as suggested by the magenta arrow. Instead, they fell smack on the ground, in the middle of a blackberry thicket. The bees