I built two of these 10 Frame AZ swarm catchers a few years ago. While I have never caught a swarm in them, they should work as a temporary home for the bees.

The inside of the catcher is heavily coated with wax. Here I am using 10 AZ frames with wax foundation. Note that most of these frames were converted Lang deep frames.

I will remove some of the frames to give me a good space to dump the bees once collected.

The swarm catches are made from 3/4” thick OSB and are really heavy. OK for a swarm catcher, but not for collecting swarms from up in a tree.

For this I will be using this normal 5-gallon bucket. It is sitting on the top of the ladder directly under the swarm.

I do have a sieve that works very well as vented lid for the bucket. It is my plan to use it to cap the bucket after the shake.

It was a simple matter to shake the bees into the bucket. I did not use the sieve as it was too much to balance the bucket, myself and the lid on this rather unstable ladder.

The lid was placed on the catcher, and I placed a small piece of wood near the entrance to act as a ramp. This would also allow me to watch the bee behavior.

Immediately some bees started coming just outside the entrance and fanning. They are letting the other bees know that the queen is inside. This is a good sign the queen made it inside the hive.

There were still some bees that reformed on the tree limb. I collected these into my bucket.

Because there could also be another queen in this bunch, I released the bees near the entrance to observe them entering the hive.

Most of them marched directly into the hive while even more positioned themselves on the ramp and began fanning.

Once the only bees that were left made their way inside the hive, all that were left were these fanning bees.

The remaining bees were scooped up and the hive was moved to its new (temporary) location.

The lid was removed, and the missing frames were carefully inserted into the hive.

Now I will just wait and let things settle down for a few days.

On the very next day, another swarm started forming in nearly the same location. This one, I could reach from the ground.

I repeated the process and things went exactly the same as before.

A little video of the second bucket full marching into the hive.

I now have two 10 frame hives, we are just starting our honey flow, so I have a just a little time before I have to move them into my main AZ hives.

This gives me a little time to figure out the best way to do this.

Here is the second swarm just 24 hours after the collection. I left a frame out and they have the comb build out into the empty frame space. Busy little bees.