Excitement!

Yesterday had a bit of extra excitement added - when I came home from bringing the post to the post office, there was more buzzing than usual in our garden. There's usually a lot of bees hanging out on our flowers, so there's a bit of a sound carpet there all the time - but this time around, the sound was coming from the willow fence, and that is a place that's not usually abuzz.

The reason for it? There was a bee swarm on the fence, almost next to the garden door.

(I wanted to post a video of the swarm, but it refused to upload... sorry, folks.)

It's more or less the typical time for bees to swarm - which is how, back in the day when they were still wild bees, they proliferated. When there's enough food and the weather is warm and dry and the old queen has been laying a lot of eggs, the workers go ahead and get some new queens started. And then the old lady takes a good part of her bees and flies off to find a new home, leaving the cozy, well-equipped place to the young one.

Because it's obviously not the queen's job to find the new home, she hangs out with most of her staff protecting her. Meanwhile, scouts are flying out to find something nice to live in. Once they come back successfully, and a committee of bees has agreed that the new home is acceptable, the swarm goes there to start a new life.

Well. Add in some hundreds of years of domestication and breeding, plus the relatively new parasite (the varroa mite), and what worked for the wild bees in theory does not work for the modern honey bee anymore. The swarming out does, yes, but there's not so many places where they could settle these days, and even if they find a hollow tree trunk or something similar, the odds that the hive will survive the winter are about... zero. The mites will take care of that.

Fortunately, our neighbour (who has bees) was home, and he had a spare box, and a catching bag, so he came over and got the swarm to give them a new home. That was a nice addition of a little excitement to the afternoon for all of us - me, the neighbour, and the bees!