A Royal Funeral Procession I witnessed last June. The story is pretty amazing, as well. So, we get a swarm call one morning. Lady says she has a swarm of bees on her raised garden bed and the whole family is anaphylactic We arrived to find a small handful of bees clustered around a dying queen near ground level. It appeared she had a punctured abdomen. Sad to see this, but I picked up her nearly limp body and placed her in the nuc I brought, to at least remove the bees from the garden. As expected, the small cluster of a few hundred bees jumped on board the nuc and starting fanning scent, like any normal swarm would with a captured queen. Thinking that was that, we started looking around the ladys beautiful garden and rabbitry. After about 5 minutes of her showing us around, we heard that increasingly loud jet plane roar that only bee swarms have. we looked up to see the sky filled with THOUSANDS of bees descending on the nuc with their dying queen and handful of sisters inside... (See accompanying video) I can only guess that when the queen was injured, the main swarm flew to a neighboring tree to wait it out...and it was just the queens retinue that I had in the box...?? but, it was like they knew it was safe to come out...that they knew their bee sisters had found a safe home...like they knew I would save them.......(in actuality, it was them fanning the pheremone that brought in the rest of the colony...lol) But, it did make me look like the bee whisperer to the homeowner!!! When we got back to the apiary, as I was giving them a frame of eggs/brood, I witnessed them somberly carrying their queen out in a last show of thanks for holding on just long enough for them to find a way to go on! It is one of the most amazing, connecting experiences Ive had with bees, to date...
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:05:16 +0000
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