Surprise into my garden !

LOOK what i found into my garden !....i think its a Bee swarm on tree branch !..any suggestions?

Yes, they are coming together because their hive was too small. They usually stay balled up until the new queen picks a site for their new home. This can take hours or a few days. Leave them alone. We had bees in an old stone chimney and they did this every spring. There is usually another group that will stay in the original hive unless something happened to disturb that hive. That hive is somewhere nearby. They like to make their hive entrance facing east.

My neighbor has an apiary with twelve hives. He sent me this picture today. The swarm is low...about three and a half meters from the ground. We've watched beekeepers capture swarms. They shoot a gun at the tree. Bees respond to the vibration by dropping to the ground in one big mass. The beekeeper suits up and walks into the puddle of bees with a smoker, hunting for the queen. The queen is placed in a transport box near the bees. A few hours later the bees form columns and walk into the box. They don't appear to fly around during this event.

Astounding story about capturing swarms.... thanks for sharing! - Nancy

We have a cottage in the Appalachian foothills. Never seem short of wildlife adventures. Our bees lived between the stone exterior and the chimney flue. Several times the bees swarmed down into the basement. One time we came in and thousands of bees lay dead in piles along the south windows in the living room. Swarms can have up to thirty thousand bees. They had a strange smell...like hay. Another year we were in the house, which is a rather rustic structure, when we heard that deafening hum we had come to recognize as a swarm and realized it was coming from the walls. Then bees started squeezing out of the plug outlets, from the baseboards and through the floor jams. We opened all the doors, took the screens out of the south windows and fled outdoors. They flew out.

Wow! What an experience!

We had a small hive here at work - in the outside stairwell above the middle landing of the south entrance to our facility. I was able to get approval from corporate real estate (who make all decisions large and small regarding the building where I work... -:) to approve a bee relocation service. I was really sweating the approval because everyone here was armed with wasp spray (I work in a construction yard for a technology company... and all the techs have wasp spray on their trucks)... and I thought for sure the bees would be harmed before I could have them relocated. Thankfully, that didn't happen and as I understand it they are living safely out in the Malibu area somewhere... but it was interesting to see what the remaining bees did after the swarm was removed... they created a teardrop shaped huddle... hanging from the rafters of that outside stairwell. The bee experts told me that was a normal huddle... that they were making a decision as to where to go now that the queen was gone... and that they would disappear in a day or two and that is exactly what they did. Very interesting to observe bees doing what they do... but you have had so many interesting experiences... sounds like there must be many plants in the area that they approve of!

Forgot to ask Vtr... are they still there?

egads, these stories!
Friend of mine seemed to have a flying swarm come through her yard last weekend. I've never seen that or a clumped swarm.