As far as the swarm, you can spray them with some sugar-water to keep them busy, then brush them into a 5-gal bucket with some screen windows. Wear protective cloths if you have them, just in case they are Africanized.
Better yet, contact the local bee-keeping club (most have web groups and sites). They usually have a network of people to find and capture swarms, so it could be a matter of hours to get someone out there to get them.
From what I understand, those losses are true, but mostly commercial bee-keepers that move the bees from place to place. The assumption is that new classes of pesticides are accumulating in the hives to a critical threshold.
The Europeans have made these new pesticides illegal in an effort to help the bees, but us good old Americans are going to wait and see until they are all dead to do anything about it. Perhaps that is a good strategy if we see the European bees bounce back when the pesticides are gone, and the American bees severely struggle.
If it is killing the bees, it cannot be doing humans much better. Not entirely trusting our government to be regulating this stuff.
