Saturday, September 15, 2012

Swarming Again

Just after 1:00pm, the roar of bees came from the backyard. Outside, bees were streaming out of the hive that swarmed 11 days ago, and circling above:
I don't think a still photo can ever capture how amazing a swarm in motion is. After about 15 minutes, they settled on the garage roof:
That didn't look like a good place for them to stop, but at least they weren't somewhere where we needed to deal with them.

A few hours later they had settled for the night:
Up high in a tree where they won't bother anyone. Too high to be retrieved. They can stay there until they find a new home for themselves and fly away, which should happen in a day or two.

4 comments:

kaiteM said...

Those bees of yours are getting scary, you're not encouraging me to ever try it.

annie said...

Does this mean that your hives have lost all the bees or have some stayed and will rebuild the colony? Sorry if I'm showing my ignorance. =))

Chiara Z said...

Just letting them go sounds much more peaceful than your last description of swarm behaviour. So they'll just find a place to build a hive "in the wild", will they?

Vireya said...

Swarms are how bees reproduce the hive. The ones who fly off start a new hive in the wild somewhere, but there are plenty left to get on with life. This swarm is actually the second one from the same hive. There could still be another - a couple of the hives swarmed 3 times last year. If you catch a swarm you then have one more hive than you had before, so that quickly becomes too many hives!