{"id":20954,"date":"2015-05-09T01:01:40","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T08:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=20954"},"modified":"2015-05-09T01:01:40","modified_gmt":"2015-05-09T08:01:40","slug":"the-swarm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/09\/the-swarm\/","title":{"rendered":"The swarm"},"content":{"rendered":"

My neighbor had another<\/i> bee swarm. Three in the space of eight days! I missed the first two, but she called me as soon as she spotted the latest and I got to watch our friendly neighborhood expert deal with it.<\/p>\n

Here’s the swarm:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-01_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe this is nothing new to you. I know quite a few readers of Living Freedom keep bees. But I’ve never seen a swarm, so I was fascinated — along with all the little neighborhood boys and pretty much everybody else who happened to be home at the time.<\/p>\n

I always thought swarming bees massed themselves onto some object. A car grille. A tree trunk. Or the eave of a house. But that entire beehive-shaped mass is made up solidly of insects. Can’t imagine the ones at the center were very comfortable.<\/p>\n

The neighbor whose yard this is has five hives. She doesn’t do any of her own bee handling. So she called in Richard, who lives down the street and has 30 or 40 hives. While waiting for him, she set up a pair of sawhorses and topped them with boards to make a working platform.<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-02_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After prepping the hive, the first thing Richard did was press the hive box to the bottom of the swarm.<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-03_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When he stepped back off the platform, the bottom of the swarm was no longer smooth and beehive-shaped. It was jagged. Thousands of critters had transferred into the box. So far, everything was calm.<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-04_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Apparently the queen wasn’t yet among the new residents, so the bees in the tree were inclined to remain there. At that point, Richard walked behind the tree and gave it a vigorous shake. Thousands more bees cascaded down into the hive. <\/p>\n

A few hundred, though, just got mad. Richard dashed off to the back of the yard, pursued by furious beasties.<\/p>\n

I’d asked him earlier why he wasn’t wearing any special bee-handling gear. Was it because (as I’ve heard) swarming bees are very docile? <\/p>\n

“I never wear gear,” he said. “I just get stung.”<\/p>\n

Still, I think he was a little surprised at the bad temper of these guys.<\/p>\n

“Italian bees,” he said. “Apis mellifera ligustica<\/i>. More aggressive than most.” (Wikipedia disagrees about Italian bees being aggressive<\/a>, but apparently some of their hybrids can be vicious little cusses.)<\/p>\n

By then over half the swarm was down. But Richard said the queen was still probably not in the hive. So this time he grabbed a 12-foot fruit-picking pole and gave the remaining segment of the swarm another shake. Down the rest of the swarm fell in an ugly brown mass. All into and around the hive.<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-05_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That worked out better for Richard, though I think a few more still got him. He already looked like he had chicken pox and I was wondering about the cumulative effect of bee stings.<\/p>\n

But now the queen was inside and the remaining bees began an almost military march into the box.<\/p>\n

\"BeeSwarm-06_050815\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This took a while and I didn’t wait around to see how Richard got the hive out of there. Since he arrived in a passenger car, I’m not really sure how he transported the hive further out into the country where he’s been moving his swarms. Not in the passenger compartment, I hope! But given his bravado with bees, I wouldn’t put it past him.<\/p>\n

Even knowing very little about beekeeping, I assume that Richard’s methods aren’t exactly what you might call best practices in the industry. So if any of you apiarists want to chime in with “don’t try this at home” advice, feel free.<\/p>\n

The weird thing is that neither Richard nor the neighbor with the swarm ever harvest any honey. They just keep bees for what they (only half jokingly) call “humanitarian reasons.”<\/p>\n

It’s great. But I tell ya, if I were ever going to endure all those “slings<\/del> stings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” I’d at least want to get some sweet goodness as a reward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My neighbor had another bee swarm. Three in the space of eight days! I missed the first two, but she called me as soon as she spotted the latest and I got to watch our friendly neighborhood expert deal with it. Here’s the swarm:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rural-and-small-town-living","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}