Once you get into bees and people start to find out you are a beekeeper, you immediately start getting calls about bees. Bees in house walls, bees in bushes, bees in the ground, and bees in a tree. When I get a call like this I immediately start asking questions to find out if these are bees that I can get, what work will be involved to get them, how long the bees have been living where they are, and so on. When I find out the bees are in a tree, I tell the bee enthusiast that they have what many bee keepers will call a BEE TREE!!! I will ask how high the entrance is off of the ground where the bees are living and if the bees are bothering anyone. If I find out the bees are not bothering anyone, then I will immediately recommend leaving the bees alone! Why, might you ask, when these are the same free and feral bees I tell everyone to get?!?! The answer is simple. Those bees are in the most perfect, safe place for them to thrive as God intended…without interference from man, they should be just fine! What you can get from these bees should they survive the following winter and turn out to really be good bees is… a swarm! Next spring, when the first blossoms start to bloom and the temperatures start hitting the sixties, those bees will kick it into overdrive and start collecting nectar and pollen as fast as they can to replenish the stores they go through during the previous winter. This in turn marks the beginning of my favorite season…SWARM SEASON!!! Get your swarm traps up around the bee tree. On a beautiful, sunny, and seventy degree day, you will have a chance to catch great bees! So, at the end of the day, let the bees be bees, leave them in the bee tree, and start collecting healthy swarms from them every spring so that you too, can Bee Kept!!!
