One of the few things we all know about bees is that there’s a queen bee. As in life she rules the hive and is waited on hand and foot by the worker bees. And though most of us know there are drone bees too we probably don’t know the difference between the two. As for virgin queens, royal jelly, pheromones and piping noises…well, that leaves us baffled and ready to change the subject.
Swarms of bees are different though. They appear from nowhere and are scary. And very buzzy. They make us feel helpless and want to scuttle indoors till they go away. Or don’t. That’s usually the problem. They often don’t.
And that’s exactly what happened to us last week. Twice. The first time Rosie was propagating in the greenhouse (behave yourself, you know what I mean) when she heard the mellifluous hum of fifty thousand bees outside the door. Sensibly she stayed inside, watching as they circled the apple blossom and began to settle on the nearby rambling rector (come now, you know I mean climbing rose not local vicar). Luckily it wasn’t too long before they’d formed quite a cluster and she was able to make a dash for it. And a few hours later they’d all gone, back, one presumes, whence they came.
But a couple of days later they were back. And in hot pursuit of the bees was the swarm’s bare-footed owner, Joe. He’d spotted their departure from his hive and tracked their flight to our garden. This time the bees decided our olive tree took their fancy and it wasn’t long before the cluster was a good eighteen inches long with the queen bee buried alive somewhere in the middle of them all. Joe assured us they’d be happy there for a while so he disappeared to dress more suitably and I grabbed my camera to capture the drama. As it transpired there was no drama…Joe snipped a branch of the olive and the main cluster obediently dropped into his box. The few remaining outriders formed a secondary smaller cluster on the quince tree but even they lost interest by dusk and were gone by morning.
If you’d like to know more about bees, who does the work (the females of course), what role the male bees play (to mate with the virgin queens) and why they swarm you could do worse than go to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee).
On the other hand, you may prefer to accept Winnie-the-Pooh’s thoughts on bees:
“That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason that I know of is because you’re a bee.”
“And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.”
“And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.”
And that’s the only explanation you’re going to get from me.