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Tuesday, May 25, 2010

BEES!

Yesterday afternoon, Logan looked out the window and said "There are a lot of bees over there, Mom! ARE those bees?"

I looked out the window and saw a cloud of bugs flying around between the neighbor's house and mine. At first, I thought it was just a hatching of mayflies or something like that, but then I realized it was pretty concentrated.



I stepped outside and walked a bit closer and heard the buzzing (like in the movies!) and saw that it was indeed a swarm of bees. They were forming a clump in the neighbor's tree and the cloud wasn't bees just flying around, they were making a, well, beeline right to the tree. I guess they were following the queen.

So, they took up residence and made a cone-shaped clump in the tree.





I called the neighbors on their cell phones to alert them about the bees so they wouldn't disturb them when they got home from work. Later, the neighbors came home and called a guy who keeps bees. He came out with a nifty vacuum thing and got right up there and sucked the bees into boxes and took them away to make some honey. It was amazing, he was right up in the bees and they didn't seem to mind at all. You could see groups of them going through the tube into the boxes.





We were eating dinner at the time on the deck so it was great entertainment. You don't often get to see an estimated 20,000 bees (that's what the bee guy said) vacuumed out of your neighbor's tree!

3 comments:

Tina said...

I would NOT have been so calm around those things. I would have been freaking out. Bees scare me more than spiders and cockroaches combined. They are my least favorite insect out there!

Paula said...

Interesting... You probably have another hive of bees around there somewhere and this group split from that hive and followed a new queen.

Brooke said...

WOW... Bet that was interesting for all of you. We use to keep beehives at my family's orchard and loved watching them.