Bivouac Lures

Introduction

Can you believe that we’re at the end of May already? This year is going by faster than ever. After nearly a month of dry weather we have rain. Lots of it. New beekeeper Louise and I got all the swarm inspections done earlier in the week between the showers one day but the big pink brolly (umbrella) with the echinacea flower was close by. Frequent heavy showers are lurking around again today.

The bees are all sorted this week with two colonies still to make swarm plans and the other two making new queens. They filled all the supers before the OSR field faded and I harvested a bumper spring crop for the first time ever. The difference has been excellent weather and top insulation to keep the supers cosy on the cold nights. Instead of putting the wet supers back immediately when there was still a chance of them bringing in the last OSR nectar which would crystalise, I gave them deep frames with foundation to draw and they started on that job immediately. This means that I will have a store of newly drawn frames for the future. I’ll give them back the wet supers when I take off the deep boxes.

Subscribing

This week I discovered that the subscribe button has been out of action for nearly three weeks so I apologise to anyone who has been unable to sign up for weekly blogs. Thank you for your patience with that. I must thank my admin support Iain Wilson from Sydney Australia for quickly responding and sorting it out with Jetpack once we discovered the problem. Thanks, Iain.

Lures

A couple of readers asked me to share more information more about bivouac lures. I’m just experimenting with them for the first time myself but I bet some of you already have experience with them. We would love to hear how you got on. Bivouac lures are probably not as commonly used as bait hives though which are different altogether but equally useful if you want to collect unknown swarms. I just want my own swarms. Bait hives are usually boxes containing a few frames that attract a swarm, usually from outside your apiary, that chooses this box for their new home. They are chosen as a new home rather than a temporary resting place. A bivouac lure will attract only your own swarms unless your next-door neighbour is also a beekeeper. You will have to collect a swarm before the bees warm their flight muscles and fly off. Have a water spray handy if the swarm has been settled for a while and give it a light spray to cool them down and delay departure till you collect them.

I don’t want to collect unknown swarms, which might carry varroa and disease and interfere with my selection of colonies showing resistance to varroa, so I am using bivouac lures to make sure that the swarms are from my own apiary. I’ll hopefully attract my own swarms if I miss queen cells during my swarm control management. This happens every year with at least one colony.

From previous research on swarming, we know that a swarm usually first settles within around 30 ft (10 m) of its hive in what we call a bivouac cluster which is a temporary resting place until a decision is made about which new home will be best. Occasionally, a swarm has already decided where to go before it leaves the parent hive, and then it flies straight off to the new home without settling in a bivouac cluster.

Many experienced beekeepers already know of a favourite shrub, hedge or tree that their swarming bees land on every year and that would be a good spot to place a lure. Queen mandibular pheromone is strong and the scent can linger. I remember teaching a swarm course with Tony Harris when he amused the class by suggesting they make a swarm post in their apiaries and rub a dead queen over it. You can do that, and you can also buy a synthetic swarm lure, or rub lemongrass essential oil on your swarm post/lure. The thing to remember is that the volatile essential oil dissipates quickly and you need to rub more on every few days.

Bivouac lures might not work for everyone but are well worth a try, I think. A local beekeeper I know has a low hedge all round his apiary and he catches swarms easily from this hedge so he wouldn’t use one of these lures. There are many different ways to attract swarms initially and there is no one right way to do it. Inventive beekeepers will find a good way that works well for them.

As yet we have no scientific basis for choosing a particular method since we don’t know yet what the swarm is looking for in a temporary bivouac site. So, the reason for making a lure is to make swarm collecting easier for us. The main principle is to have a detachable resting place that has a swarm lure pheromone attached.  One method is to go off to the nearest woods and find a limb from a tree that has been blown down in a storm but still has a couple of branches for the bees to settle on. You want one no longer than about 3 feet otherwise it becomes too unwieldy to carry with the swarm attached. Large swarms can be pretty heavy. If you dig a hole in the ground and place a piece of PVC piping in it you can stand the branch in this for stability but it will still be easy to remove when it successfully attracts the swarm and you want to shake the swarm into your hive.

If you already have a sturdy low hanging tree branch in your apiary you could hang a straw skep with an easy- to- detach rope or string. I experimented for the first time this year with a post lure and a vertical board attached. Frank Linton, in his excellent article (April 2025 American Bee Journal page 405) suggests using a horizontal board. I just copied the board that I had seen in Professor Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy and it worked fine for me. If it has a rough surface or fine mesh it will give the bees better purchase for holding on.

I collected a tiny swarm from my lure recently. I’d taken the queen out of a small colony for the observation hive and left the bees to get on with making and choosing their own queen. They made a few more queen cells and swarmed onto my lure just opposite their nuc.

Good luck with your bivouac lure if you decide to try it out.